The funny thing is that just yesterday her husband, an editor at The Federalist, published a piece by an MD (who hadn't practiced medicine in 25 years) saying that people should have Covid-19 parties where they contract the disease for the common good. Spare me. 
On that hellacious article. vice.com/en_us/article/…
When this horrible passage in our nation's history ends, we need to compile a long list of people whose opinions deserve not a single iota of any decent person's attention. Out the Overton window with a whole slew of cruel, cynical, and just downright dopey people.
I'm not calling for censorship. These people can spout off all they want. I'm calling for distinguishing between ideas we disagree with but which are offered in good faith and are worth engaging with...and ideas that are simply not worth anyone's time.
Here's a thread explaining more fully what I'm talking about here. Certain things--such as white nationalism, authoritarianism, disinformation--were once outside the "Overton window" of what was considered appropriate political discourse.
That Overton window is policed not by the state, but by the diverse array of people who make decisions about the sort of content that gets pumped out into the world through our media outlets. Racial demagoguery gets clicks. That doesn't mean you have to do it, however.
Sympathetic stories that normalize Qanon conspiracy theories sure get attention and get folks in that community to feel positively about your station, but you can choose not to give that crap air.
There was not a serious, non-racist person in politics or the media who took Breitbart even remotely seriously in 2014. The idiotic and hateful worldview of that media outlet is now pretty much normalized in Trump's GOP.
Free speech is a foundational tenet of American political culture. But how do we deal with the proliferation of hateful, racist speech that has gained so much traction on the American right, pushing us perilously close to authoritarianism? wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/e…
Some mystical sense of American exceptionalism will not inoculate us from authoritarianism. The mechanics of our political system, especially now that Mitch has steadily populated the judiciary with right wingers, will not save us from authoritarianism.
A good place to start would be to have a self-described "conservative" movement, media, and party that does not look upon an aspiring authoritarian and think "he seems like a good guy to nominate."
Or a self-described "conservative" movement, media, and party that doesn't look at racist messaging campaigns and think "that'll work great to get our guy elected, let's do it!" Is that really so much to ask, from people who claim to be morally-upright?
I mean, a guy who funnelled hundreds of stories from white nationalist/Nazi websites like Stormfront to editors at Breitbart with the hopes they'd publish them is now serving as one of the President's closest advisors. npr.org/2019/11/26/783…
Imagine a world where a White House advisor who is revealed to have spent hours reading and then trying to promote Neo-Nazi websites just gets fired for it. What a thought, eh? LIke, ideas have consequences, right? Oh, unless they're fascist ideas, then never mind.
