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24 Dec 20 5:53 am
+ Trump Back At Mar-A-Lago, Raising Taxpayer Golf Tab To $151.5 Million
This marks Trump’s 31st golf trip to his Palm Beach resort, which in total account for just over two-thirds of his golf-related travel and security costs.
By S.V. Date
12/23/2020 07:08 PM ET
President Donald Trump drives golf cart number 45 at Trump National Golf Club on Dec. 13, 2020, in Sterling, Virginia. (Al Drago via Getty Images)
Donald Trump has arrived at his Palm Beach, Florida, resort for the 31st golf vacation there of his presidency, raising the taxpayer-funded travel and security total for his hobby to $151.5 million, according to a HuffPost analysis.
Trump has already played golf on his own properties 289 times since taking office in January 2017, although he claimed during his 2016 campaign that he would not have time for a vacation at all. “I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off,” he said in February 2016.
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23 Dec 20 5:15 am
+ A white supremacist who has advocated for legalizing child porn was arrested and charged with kidnapping a 12-year-old girl he met online
Rachel E. Greenspan
Mon, December 21, 2020, 2:28 PM CST
The home of Nathan Larson, who was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of harboring a minor, in Catlett, Virginia. Fresno County Sheriff's Office
A 40-year-old man with a history of supporting pedophilia and rape was arrested and charged with kidnapping a 12-year-old girl, police said.
Nathan Larson, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2018, previously admitted to HuffPost that he was a pedophile.
In a manifesto for his congressional run in Virginia, Larson advocated for the legalization of child porn.
A self-proclaimed white supremacist who has advocated for the legalization of child porn and created online chat rooms for pedophiles was arrested and charged with kidnapping a 12-year-old girl.
Authorities said Nathan Larson abducted the girl after meeting her on social media in the fall, according to a Saturday press release from the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. Fresno police said Larson was arrested at the Denver International Airport during a layover with the girl, who was reported missing on December 14 and has since been reunited with her family. Larson, who is 40, was flying with the girl from Fresno to his home in Virginia, according to police.
Larson faces a misdemeanor charge of harboring a minor as well as federal charges of kidnapping, child abduction, soliciting child pornography from a minor, and meeting a child for the intention of sex.
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22 Dec 20 11:57 am
+ Trump's legacy: He changed the presidency, but will it last?
JONATHAN LEMIRE, ZEKE MILLER and DARLENE SUPERVILLE
Sun, December 20, 2020, 11:38 PM CST
WASHINGTON (AP) — The most improbable of presidents, Donald Trump reshaped the office and shattered its centuries-old norms and traditions while dominating the national discourse like no one before.
Trump, governing by whim and tweet, deepened the nation’s racial and cultural divides and undermined faith in its institutions. His legacy: a tumultuous four years that were marked by his impeachment, failures during the worst pandemic in a century and his refusal to accept defeat.
He smashed conceptions about how presidents behave and communicate, offering unvarnished thoughts and policy declarations alike, pulling back the curtain for the American people while enthralling supporters and unnerving foes — and sometimes allies — both at home and abroad.
While the nation would be hardpressed to elect another figure as disruptive as Trump, it remains to be seen how much of his imprint on the office itself, occupied by only 44 other men, will be indelible. Already it shadows the work of his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, who framed his candidacy as a repudiation of Trump, offering himself as an antidote to the chaos and dissent of the past four years while vowing to restore dignity to the Oval Office.
“For all four years, this is someone who at every opportunity tried to stretch presidential power beyond the limits of the law,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “He altered the presidency in many ways, but many of them can be changed back almost overnight by a president who wants to make the point that there is a change.”
Trump's most enduring legacy may be his use of the trappings of the presidency to erode Americans’ views of the institutions of their own government.
From his first moments in office, Trump waged an assault on the federal bureaucracy, casting a suspicious eye on career officials he deemed the “Deep State” and shaking Americans' confidence in civil servants and the levers of government. Believing that the investigation into Russian election interference was a crusade to undermine him, Trump went after the intelligence agencies and Justice Department — calling out leaders by name — and later unleashed broadsides against the man running the probe, respected special counsel Robert Mueller.
His other targets were legion: the Supreme Court for insufficient loyalty; the post office for its handling of mail-in ballots; even the integrity of the vote itself with his baseless claims of election fraud.
“In the past, presidents who lost were always willing to turn the office over to the next person. They were willing to accept the vote of the American public,” said Richard Waterman, who studies the presidency at the University of Kentucky. “What we’re seeing right now is really an assault on the institutions of democracy.”
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16 Dec 20 5:54 am
+ MacKenzie Scott donates $4.2 billion to 384 organizations
By Jazmin Goodwin, CNN Business
Updated 6:28 PM EST, Tue December 15, 2020
New York(CNN Business)MacKenzie Scott announced on Tuesday her second major charitable contribution of the year, giving away nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations as part of a plan to donate a majority of her fortune.
The announcement comes just four months after Scott donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, including four historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), in July. The latest round of philanthropic gifts total more than $4.16 billion donated by Scott to organizations nationwide in the past four months.
"The pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling," Scott wrote in a Medium post. "Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires."
Scott's post included a list of the hundreds of organizations that received funds, including financial service providers for under-resourced communities, education for historically marginalized and underserved individuals, civil rights advocacy groups and legal defense funds that take on institutional discrimination.
Scott, who is a philanthropist and author as well as the ex-wife of Amazon (AMZN)founder Jeff Bezos, noted that her team examined more than 6,490 organizations to determine which groups would receive the donations following her decision to accelerate the pace of her giving this year.
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12 Dec 20 12:51 pm
+ Trump's desperate gambit to stay in office alarms Europeans, who know about coups
Melissa Rossi
Fri, December 11, 2020, 5:35 PM CST
BARCELONA — Last month, when Sweden’s TV4, the largest broadcast network in Scandinavia, sent political correspondent Ann Tiberg to cover the U.S. election, her producers were so afraid of the possible mayhem awaiting her that they insisted she pack a bulletproof vest, helmet and gas mask. Understandably: The United States had often appeared out of control in previous months, and not just due to COVID-19. The president had urged his followers to vote twice and cryptically told the militia group the Proud Boys to “stand by”; peaceful protests sometimes turned ugly, devolving into looting and the occasional fatal shooting; showdowns between armed groups were widely predicted for Election Day.
Happily, Tiberg didn’t need the combat gear. “There was no violence, and not a lot of cheating — the system worked. And people showed up in numbers never seen before. I thought that was so impressive. That’s what I brought back to my viewers: The U.S. pulled it off.”
Citizens across the Atlantic cheered the election results. “Europeans were overwhelmingly happy that Trump lost and Biden won,” says Jon Henley, political reporter for the London-based Guardian. But now, “they’re looking on in shock, horror and disbelief — saying this is not right and this is dangerous.”
After being cast aside by Trump as irrelevant and viewing the administration over the last four years from an icy distance — and preoccupied with the pandemic, Brexit, economic meltdowns, terror attacks and violence-ridden demonstrations against police brutality in France, among other crises — Europeans were bewildered at first by the chaos unleashed by Trump’s desperate efforts to stay in power.
But they are paying attention now. “People are deeply dismayed by what they’re seeing unfold,” says Dave Keating, a Connecticut-born politics reporter now working for French, German and British media from Brussels. “Particularly damaging is that the last few weeks have called into question the rule of law and political stability in the U.S.” And at least some political analysts are worried that the violence expected during election week may instead take place when the Electoral College votes are finalized in January and Trump’s fantasies of overturning the results have become moot.
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11 Dec 20 11:40 am
+ Lawyers' group calls for disciplining Trump legal team over 'dangerous' fraud allegations
Crystal Hill
Wed, December 9, 2020, 3:56 PM CST
When lawsuits began flooding state and federal courts after Election Day, the legal team for President Trump’s reelection campaign, and his supporters, said that as a candidate he was merely exercising his right to explore every legal remedy at his disposal.
More than four weeks and 40 losses later, observers in the legal community are aghast at how the campaign is using the judicial system to push baseless allegations of systemic voter fraud, and they want the lawyers leading the effort to be held accountable.
“I would like my right to practice law to mean something,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor and leading constitutional scholar, told Yahoo News. “And if you can just use your law license to fling bulls*** around, if you can use your law license to take up the time of the court, consume their resources, and undermine the credibility of the legal profession on which the rule of law largely depends in this country — then that’s a terrible thing.”
Tribe and more than 1,000 current and former attorneys, retired judges and justices, law professors, former bar association presidents and concerned citizens have signed an open letter calling on bar associations to disavow the Trump campaign attorneys’ conduct, and on disciplinary authorities to investigate, the advocacy group Lawyers Defending American Democracy announced this week.
“A license to practice law is not a license to lie to the public on behalf of a client, whether doing so endangers one individual or the entire body politic,” the letter says. “American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1(a) and 8.4(c) put lawyers at risk of sanctions for engaging in dishonesty, deceit and misrepresentation — in or out of court.”
The group calls out Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, his campaign’s senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis, and lawyers Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell and Joseph diGenova. DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said during a broadcast interview that Christopher Krebs, the administration’s election security director who was fired by Trump for denying that the Nov. 3 election was tainted by fraud, should be “taken out at dawn and shot.”
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05 Dec 20 5:46 am
+ Most conservatives don't understand purpose of journalism, says founder of website on media bias
Jon Ward
Thu, December 3, 2020, 5:10 PM CST
In 2005, Matthew Sheffield launched what would become one of the preeminent conservative websites devoted to calling out liberal bias in the mainstream media.
Over the last decade, however, Sheffield — who founded NewsBusters with his brother Greg and worked there until 2014 — has come to believe that he was part of a problem, not a solution, and is now working to correct that error.
The problem, as he describes it, is that most conservatives think the purpose of journalism is to wage partisan political warfare, and that has created an ecosystem on the right where facts and truth are increasingly irrelevant.
This dynamic is at play most recently in the move by many Trump supporters to stop watching Fox News because, while it is conservative, it is not slavish enough toward the president. Instead, many Trump supporters are moving toward channels that repeat the president’s lies about a stolen election without any scrutiny or standards for fact checking.
“If you go to and look at the history of conservative media enterprises that are large scale and exist presently, every single one of them was created to propagate and propagandize for a particular political viewpoint, literally without exception,” Sheffield said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. “And that is not the case for just so many mainstream outlets.”
In a recent Twitter thread, Sheffield wrote that he “was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being ‘unfair’ to conservative views.”
While Sheffield’s view on liberal bias hasn’t changed entirely, it has become more nuanced. “There is still much to that argument,” he wrote, “but eventually I saw that I was missing context.”
After Sheffield went to work at the Washington Examiner, where he was the newspaper’s first online editor, he says he realized that “U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.”
“I didn’t understand that journalism is supposed to portray reality,” he wrote.
The Examiner was the first place where Sheffield says he saw the kind of standards that differentiate “actual media and reporting institutions” — which may have inherent or even conscious bias — from right-wing websites for which partisan bias is the north star, the guiding principle.
“Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact,” he wrote. “I eventually realized that most people who run right-dominated media outlets see it as their DUTY to be unfair and to favor Republicans because doing so would somehow counteract perceived liberal bias.”
“Most conservative media figures have no journalism training or desire to fact-check their own side,” he added.
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05 Dec 20 5:35 am
+ Republican lawmaker likens Trump vote-fraud crusade to the search for Bigfoot
Michael Isikoff
Fri, December 4, 2020, 7:00 AM CST
It was only recently that U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., had his epiphany: The supporters of President Trump were starting to resemble the people who he used to hang out with more than 15 years ago when — mostly as a lark — he would go on expeditions to the Pacific Northwest looking for Bigfoot.
“It was almost a cult or a religious belief system,” Riggleman said about his Bigfoot hunting days in an interview for the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.”
Riggleman, then a National Security Agency contractor, never saw any sign of the mythical hairy behemoth believed by some to be hiding deep in the far-flung forests of North America. But his fellow Bigfoot explorers saw signs of the creature everywhere, especially at night.
“Everybody saw red eyes. They had rocks thrown at them. They heard hoots and hollers and screams. They saw bent branches that were the territorial markings of Bigfoot,” Riggleman recalled. “All I heard were friggin’ squirrels and birds screeching.”
Back then, Riggleman says, he quickly realized there was no way to have a rational discussion about the subject with Bigfoot believers.
“No matter what I used as logic, it was turned back on me,” Riggleman said. “There was no basis I could get to them where we had a common understanding of what facts were and what truth was.”
So now it has become, Riggleman told “Skullduggery,” with President Trump and his allies, who insist — without any credible evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats.
“Look at Rudy Giuliani. Look at Sidney Powell. Look at Jen Ellis,” Riggleman said about the lawyers who have made repeated evidence-free claims about widespread fraud that took place in the 2020 election. They have, Riggleman said, taken small, isolated instances of voter fraud or election irregularities and “turned it into systemic fraud — and that’s turned into the NSA actually exploiting and injecting code into multiple voting machines that aren’t interconnected, that Dominion has implanted code from Venezuela, and that there’s an invasion of a United States military base” [in Germany, where computer servers used in the election are supposed to have been stolen].
“It’s creating a false narrative around a small kernel of truth and radicalizing people or pushing them into a belief system through a digital virus that is social media,” Riggleman added.
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29 Nov 20 9:21 am
+ Former ‘Apprentice’ Staffer Claims Donald Trump Wore Diapers On Set: ‘He Would Often Soil Himself’
November 28, 2020
Damir Mujezinovic
Comedian and former The Apprentice staffer Noel Casler alleged on Friday that President Donald Trump wears adult diapers and often soils himself in public.
In a video released by MeidasTouch.com, which can be viewed below, Casler said the “DiaperDon” hashtag — which has been trending on Twitter — is not just a joke. In fact, he claimed, it is “based in reality.”
“He would often soil himself on The Apprentice set,” he said of Trump, speculating that the commander-in-chief is “incontinent” from all the mind-altering substances he ingests on a daily basis.
“You know, all that stuff has a laxative, it has an effect on your bowels and his are uncontrollable. He’s worn diapers since probably the ’90s.”
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29 Nov 20 4:22 am
+ Theodore Roosevelt statue, flanked by African and Native American men, to be removed in New York
A statue of President Theodore Roosevelt at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York will be removed. (mpi43/MediaPunch/IPx)
By Meagan Flynn
June 22, 2020 at 5:59 AM EDT
For decades, a hulking bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt atop a horse, flanked by Native American and African men on foot, has greeted visitors at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The roles of the two nameless men have provoked debate and protests for years, as critics said they appeared subservient to the powerful white man, creating an unmistakable portrait of racial hierarchy and colonialism.
Now, the museum said the time has come to take down the statue of the 26th president.
On Sunday, the museum announced that it had the permission of New York City — along with the blessing of Roosevelt’s great-grandson — to remove the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, as it’s formally known. New York City owns the statue and the property on which it was built in 1940.
“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said in a statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
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29 Nov 20 3:26 am
+ Ex-Trump Lawyer Sidney Powell Mocked For Typo-Laden Lawsuits
The estranged Trump campaign lawyer filed lawsuits to overturn election results in Michigan and Georgia, rife with spelling and formatting errors.
By Ja’han Jones
11/26/2020 01:18 PM ET
Sidney Powell — a former lawyer for President Donald Trump’s campaign — filed typo-laden lawsuits alleging without evidence that voter fraud took place in Michigan and Georgia, and critics on social media roundly mocked the error-filled legal documents.
Some wondered how any lawyer could submit a formal claim so rife with errors.
In the Michigan case, for example, Powell misspelled the word “district” in the heading as “distrct.” She also dropped spaces throughout the document that groupedseveralwordstogether.
In the Georgia lawsuit, Powell misspelled “district” twice more — as “districct” and “distrcoict.”
Powell and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have filed largely unsuccessful lawsuits intended to overturn the results of the presidential race in the weeks since Election Day. President-elect Joe Biden won in states where Giuliani and others have filed suits.
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27 Nov 20 10:40 pm
+ 'He will be away from children': Houston-area priest pleads guilty to child indecency charges
Belisa Morillo, Noticias Telemundo and Luis Antonio Hernández, Noticias Telemundo
Wed, November 25, 2020, 1:53 PM CST
A Houston-area priest has pleaded guilty to child indecency charges in a case that has put a focus on the archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and its failures over the handling of sexual abuse cases.
The Rev. Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, 62, pleaded guilty to two out of five charges of indecency with a child Nov. 17, as part of an agreement with the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office. He faces 10 years in prison in the case which deals with allegations that he molested two teens more than 20 years ago after gaining the trust of their families; his sentencing is Dec. 16.
La Rosa-Lopez avoided a possible 20-year sentence with the guilty plea.
"We offered him to plead guilty on two of the greater charges, which were second-degree felonies, indecency with a child," Montgomery County chief prosecutor Nancy Hebert told Noticias Telemundo Investiga. "In exchange for that plea, we're dismissing the other three charges."
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26 Nov 20 2:29 am
+ Bill Maher Says Catherine Oxenberg’s “Hate The Cult, Love The Cultist” Approach Is Perfect For Donald Trump Era
By Dade Hayes
November 20, 2020 9:04pm
In tonight’s season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host invoked the case of New York-based sex cult Nxivm in suggesting a way to handle Donald Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen.
“The challenge for us is, how do you get people out of a cult?” Maher asked. “Especially when every time you present evidence of what is obvious reality, they take it as proof of you being in on a conspiracy to destroy them?” A recent poll found that 88% of Trump voters believe he won the election, he noted, and their conviction could cleave a large swath of America from the workings of democracy and society.
For a living example of how to rise to such an existential challenge, Maher saluted Catherine Oxenberg. The former Dynasty star’s dogged work to free her daughter, India, is depicted in two documentary series, HBO’s The Vow and Starz’ Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult.
Maher played a series of clips showing the unbridled admiration of followers of Nxivm leader Keith Raniere, who was sentenced to 120 years in prison last month, and Republican leaders lavishing praise on Trump. Maher found many points of comparison between Trump and Raniere, who gave himself the nickname Vanguard. “They had to have that one queen bee around them, who they deputized to recruit others into their sick games,” he quipped. “Vanguard had Smallville actress Alison Mack. Trump has Lindsay Graham.”
In trying to fight a “cult” that has grown tens of millions strong, he added, “you’re not just fighting the leaders, but all the enablers. They see you as an enemy. Truth is a threat to them.
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25 Nov 20 12:05 am
+ Op-Ed: In what moral universe does Biden require a Catholic task force when Trump got a free pass?
Randall Balmer
Mon, November 23, 2020, 5:00 AM CST
The election of the second Roman Catholic as president of the United States should be the occasion of great celebration among his coreligionists. Not all Catholics supported Joseph Biden, of course, though about half did. On Nov. 7, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, José Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles, congratulated Biden and Kamala Harris, and five days later so did Pope Francis. Then last week, Gomez wasn’t so sure. On Tuesday, at the end of the national meeting of the American bishops, he declared that the president-elect’s support for abortion rights presents the church with a “difficult and complex situation.”
News reports suggest that the bishops may want to deny Biden, a lifelong Catholic, access to the sacrament of Holy Communion, much the way that conservative bishops declared John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, unwelcome at the communion rail in their dioceses. Gomez has set up a task force to consider the matter. No one is yet calling this a threat of excommunication, but that effectively is what the bishops are considering.
Back in 2016, the same U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rushed to congratulate Donald Trump after his presidential victory, even before the results were certified. This year, at least one member of the conference, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, refused to acknowledge Biden as president-elect after the race was called.
To pretend that there is anything approaching moral equivalency between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, let alone to decide the matter in Trump’s favor, represents an appalling failure to exercise ethical judgment.
President Trump without remorse has separated refugee children from their parents and confined them to cages; he has borne false witness more than 22,000 times during the course of his presidency; and he has used his office to advance his political, economic and legal interests. All of that, you may say, emerged after the bishops offered their 2016 postelection congratulations, but Trump’s life to that point — littered with divorces and extramarital affairs, with workers forced to sue for their rightful pay, as well as his nasty, race-baiting campaign — foretold it all.
In what moral universe does Joe Biden, devout Roman Catholic, public servant and family man, present the bishops with difficulties and complexities while Trump gets a pass?
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24 Nov 20 6:19 pm
+ 'Beyond an embarrassment,' legal experts say of Trump and Giuliani's floundering efforts in court
"It's as dysfunctional a litigation strategy as I've ever seen," one attorney told NBC News.
Nov. 24, 2020, 6:28 AM EST / Updated Nov. 24, 2020, 7:26 AM EST
By Dareh Gregorian
Rudy Giuliani was brought in to lead an "elite strike force" of lawyers to guide President Donald Trump's legal challenges to the 2020 election, but their efforts have been "dysfunctional" and "an embarrassment," based on "unsubstantiated evidence" and "outlandish claims," legal experts told NBC News.
"It's beyond an embarrassment," said lawyer Glenn Kirschner. "It's both really poor lawyering and it has the worst possible motive behind it. It's all in the name of overturning the will of American voter."
Election lawyer Matthew Sanderson compared Giuliani unfavorably to James Baker, who led George W. Bush's legal effort in the 2000 presidential election.
"This is like Bush v. Gore, but replace James Baker with the editor of a QAnon subreddit," he said. "It's not competent lawyering. There are strategic errors, typographical errors — every kind of error you can make in a case."
"It's as dysfunctional a litigation strategy as I've ever seen," Sanderson added.
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23 Nov 20 11:17 am
+ Cancel the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree for Good
Brian Kahn
Thursday 11:50AM
This week, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was unfurled in all its floppy, haggard glory. As many a Twitter user were quick to point out, its appearance was a metaphor for this year of pandemic, a slapdash coup attempt, and a general drubbing of American exceptionalism.
This year’s tree is also perfectly poised to reflect something more than our national mood: It reflects the absolutely toxic relationship we have with the natural world and the need to rapidly reverse course. If this year’s tree sees any justice, it’s that it should be the last.
Everything about this tree tells a piece of the story of our past century-plus relationship with nature and extractive capitalism. The tree came from Oneonta, New York, located 170 miles outside New York City. It stood in someone’s yard, a 75-foot (23-meter) giant amid an otherwise entirely uninteresting, ecologically destructive swath of lawn. It’s not that this is some old growth, native tree or remnant of the forest that grew where Oneonta now stands. The tree is a Norway spruce, which, as you can likely guess from the name, is not native to the U.S. That in and of itself reflects how upended our relationship with nature is. In its previous home, though, it had an iota of dignity lost completely once it was transported to Midtown Manhattan. And in that home, it served as a veritable island for wildlife in a vast, biodiversity-poor sea of lawns.
As if to reinforce that, workers discovered an owl in the tree after transporting it to Rockefeller Center. The Northern saw-whet owl was “rescued” from the tree, which is, of course, being spun as a feel-good, cute story. NBC’s Today framed it that way, talking to Ravensbeard Wildlife Center founder Ellen Kalish who called the owl “the little gift in the tree this year.” Great, can’t wait for the children’s book to be optioned.
Today host Craig Melvin noted the owl “picked the right tree.” But me, personally, I’d call it picking exactly the wrong tree. (This is why I’m not a morning show host.) This poor owl was transported on a harrowing 170-mile (274-kilometer) journey on a flatbed and miraculously wasn’t crushed. Sure, it’s great the owl survived and will be released back into the wild. But that’s a pretty piss-poor definition of “right.”
To sum things up, the Rockefeller tree was cut down in a town itself carved out of what was, more than a century ago, an old growth forest. The tree itself was a pocket of cover for wildlife who happened to wander into said town. And an owl was scooped up in the process of cutting down the tree and transported to New York. All this reflects the ways in which we’ve subjugated nature to our whims. And really, the evolution of the Rockefeller Center tree tradition is a very apt stand-in for that in general.
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23 Nov 20 5:49 am
+ How to talk about conspiracy theories
Jon Ward
Sat, November 21, 2020, 4:21 PM CST
The holidays are coming up. And although gatherings will probably be smaller this year, or taking place virtually rather than in person, you may find yourself in a difficult conversation with a friend or family member.
Now normally, a good rule of thumb is to avoid politics at the dinner table altogether — but this year, in the aftermath of a bitterly divisive election, and with a global pandemic raging, there may be no way around it. Political arguments are a part of life, but increasingly in the U.S. they take place between people who disagree over not just policies but also objective reality, posing a dilemma over how to respond when confronted with misinformation, baseless internet rumors or conspiracy theories.
Well, first, maybe don’t start by calling them conspiracy theories. The term is occasionally useful. But to those accused of harboring them, it increasingly comes across as a pat dismissal, a way of closing off discussion. It might be helpful, however, to point out the difference between a proven conspiracy and an unproven conspiracy theory, and we’ll talk about some of those differences in a moment.
Here are the telltale signs of a conspiracy theory:
Negative evidence. The absence of evidence is a clear sign. Often someone who asks for evidence is then painted as closed-minded and potentially even part of the plot to suppress the truth.
Errant data. Conspiracy theories often rely on obscure statistical or historical data, meant to suggest a sophisticated approach but which doesn’t stand up to analysis.
An imaginary master plan. A hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it discounts the possibility of coincidence or random events. There are no accidents; everything is part of the plot, or the counterplot. Of course, that’s not how the world works. Ask yourself: Is this true of anything in your own life?
A cabal behind the scenes. There is a shadowy, often nameless villain or group of bad guys pulling the strings.
Circular reasoning or contradictory claims. Conspiracy theories don’t hew to deductive logic.
Skepticism toward accepted truth. If you hear someone saying that we can’t actually know for sure what happened, that’s a hallmark of conspiracy theories.
Self-justifying rationales. Reality itself — the existence of a plausible explanation, even one backed by evidence — is part of the plot, because “that’s what they want you to believe.”
So how to talk about it?
First, assess your audience. Are you speaking with someone who is confused by conspiracy theories, or committed to them?
If it’s simply someone who is not sure what to think, then talk about media literacy and the standards for distinguishing good information from bad.
The Cornell Alliance for Science, in its Conspiracy Theory Handbook, recommends four basic questions to help someone assess the credibility of information.
The four questions are:
Do I recognize the news organization that posted the story?
Does the information in the post seem believable?
Is the post written in a style that I expect from a professional news organization?
