To give you a sense of the article behind the conspiracy theory being pushed by McCarthy, Carlson, Greenwood, et al here’s the article’s description of the insurrection itself ... talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-sic…
2/ In other words, the story now being pushed by Trump apologists suggests that the insurrection was basically a misunderstanding by some tourists who took a wrong turn at the visitors center.
3/ It’s not clear where the author of the article was during the insurrection. But he appears to be close to many of the organizers of the insurrection and spent the two or three hours of the insurrection tweeting out tweets to various prominent African-Americans to ...
4/ “learn their place” in American society and “take a knee” to MAGA. Examples here ...
5/ Beattie was, unsurprisingly, a Trump speech writer. He was fired after @KFILE unearthed evidence that he’d attended a white supremacist conference in 2016. He seems to have remained in close touch with the White House because shortly after the Presidents defeat he ...
6/ appointed Beattie to a commission charged with Holocaust remembrance.
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There's now a Brian Sicknick "truth movement" on the right, which suggests Sicknick either died of natural causes or was murdered to tarnish ex-President Trump. Today this new conspiracy theory made its way to National Review. I trace it to its source. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-sic…
2/ The conspiracy theory seems to originate with a former Trump speech writer, Darren Beattie, who was fired in 2018 after @KFILE unearthed the fact that he'd attended a white nationalist conference in 2016. After Trump lost the November election he appointed Beattie to a ...
3/ commission charged with overseeing Holocaust commemoration.
@HeerJeet This shld really be seen in the context of the larger absurdity of much of the legal academy in which amateurs freelance in fields they have no expertise in under the imprimatur of elite university distinction. We might call it the Law and Economics Grandiosity Problem.
@HeerJeet 2/ I shld anticipate the criticism that many law profs do important work outside narrow study of law. But those are the ones who actually seek to learn from and operate within the knowledge of other fields, even if they lack formal credentials (which are often overrated.)
@HeerJeet 3/ This problem doesn't affect all communities equally. Incidents is much higher on the right. But alas it crops up across the ideological spectrum. I was first introduced to it rather roughly. Not long after I started as an editor at The American Prospect I was assigned ...
As the Dominion/Smartmatic litigation moves forward one of the most fascinating veins of reporting will be on the culture of impunity at Fox. With Rudy, Lindell, Powell these are degenerate liars and sociopaths. Evil, crazy people do evil crazy things.
2/ But Fox is a huge and hugely profitable corporation. It may be a corrosive and destructive force in American life. But it’s not run by idiots. It is remarkable to me that the actions for which they are being sued weren’t yanked back by the corporations lawyers within ...
3/ days at the very latest. By any normal standard these claims never should have aired at all. But this went on for weeks and weeks. It was crystal clear these claims were nonsense. Unlike so many other Fox News victims, these companies had every incentive to sue ...
The Supreme Court rightly put a very high bar on success in libel suits for public people and entities. You have to be wrong. And you have to have known you were wrong or have had a malicious indifference to whether you were right or wrong. It's very hard to mete that ...
2/ standard. And even in the cases I can think of where juries have found for plaintiffs often it's a generous (toward the plaintiffs) interpretation of malice. The Smartmatic/Dominion cases are the first case at scale that seems almost to try out the Sullivan standard.
3/ Fox and various other pro-Trump entities made numerous, repeated and HIGHLY damaging claims which certainly in the cases of the institutions and almost certainly with the individuals (with Lindell he may simply be crazy) they were false.
There’s an important lesson here. It is very credible that the White House denies Politicos claim that the Summers oped or Summers thinking is influencing their internal thinking because there’s basically nothing the White House has **done** to support that claim.
2/ Summers oped isn’t some big revelation or shift. (Indeed, as a separate matter the most interesting thing to me is how tepid his argument is.) with the knowledge of those views the WH has proposed a very large package, shown no inclination to meaningfully reduce ...
3/ the total package price, has said that inflation is basically a non-issue and that even in its own terms (which are not the primary terms of the argument) long term deficits will be lower with a big package now because a quicker return to growth etc.
This is my small contribution to Pandemic-era furniture design. Today is my beloved wife's birthday. A special birthday. She's a psychotherapist with a general practice, but specializing in grief. Like many therapists the pandemic has shifted her practice to virtual sessions.
2/ For many patients this means Zoom. She sits on a couch with an Ipad propped up at the right height to approximate an in-person session, usually stacking things on top of each other to get the right height. Countless therapists around the country are doing some version of this.
3/ I call this a custom therapizing bench. Basic mortise and tenon joinery. Made in Pine to keep it light weight for easy mobility. Designed to be the right height for comfortable viewing from a couch. Certainly it's not a radical design innovation. You could do something ...