A little sanewashing
From NBC and The Washington Post.
Sources of truth
Robert Reich offers sources where one might find some truth.
Robert Reich offers sources where one might find some truth.
NYT, finally, sort of
At The New York Times, they’re finally willing to say something, sort of: “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.” But as the clinical psychologists Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal have pointed out week after week on the podcast Shrinking Trump, it’s not really, or simply, a question of age. Joe Biden’s brain, they have said, is aging. But Donald Trump’s brain, they have said, is dementing.
Choice bits from Jack Smith’s filing
I find some of the details of Mike Pence’s efforts to persuade Donald Trump to accept an election loss bizarre and illuminating. These moments make me think of a parent trying to soothe an angry, tantrum-prone toddler.
Yesterday in Wisconsin
Donald Trump, lying, rambling, and rasping his way through the day.
A complaint
“Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.”
“Red flags for scholars of fascism”
Heather Cox Richardson: “Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.”
Sanewashing
Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times: “Why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.”
Seeming and appearing
Peter Baker of The New York Times on MSNBC just now, when asked about Donald Trump’s assertion that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian honor, is “much better” than the the military Medal of Honor, whose recipients are often wounded or dead: “Yeah, I mean, look, you know, he has continually and repeatedly said things that seem to denigrate military service.” Seem?
Tim Walz’s military service
Two pieces about Tim Walz’s military service, by Adam Kinzinger and Stephen Robinson.
Trump, breaking?
It sounds to me as if someone might be having a psychotic break.
Schaden meet Freude
The Washington Post reports that Project 2025 is ending its policy work. Why? The boss is angry:
Irony alert
J.D. Vance: “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.”
Chatbots and Russian propaganda
Axios reports that “the leading AI chatbots are regurgitating Russian misinformation.”
Avoiding the d-word
Avoiding talk of dementia and Trump.
The Alitos and revenge
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) writes about “Modern revenge culture, explained by Mrs. and Mr. Alito.”
Eugene Robinson asks a question
“Is Trump okay?” The answer, which Robinson doesn’t quite voice: No.
Recently updated
Harvard, Meta, and veritas: the story of a misinformation expert and misinformation.
Someone wrote a letter
In the second episode of the Shrinking Trump podcast, someone suggests that this passage from a May 15 interview with Hugh Hewitt should be shared widely as evidence that Donald Trump cannot formulate ideas cognitively.
Paul Berman on slogans
“Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.”
Katie Britt is a dirty no-good rotten liar
Pass it on.
$364M+ $355M $450M+
Engoron!
“What a sick —”
Joe Biden, this afternoon, speaking of Donald Trump.
Harvard, Meta, and veritas
From The Washington Post: “A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.”
Facts and truth
Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall an observation from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing.
Fact-free history
In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students. War is peace, &c.
Fani Willis to Jim Jordan
“Chairman Jordan, I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities”: Fani Willis’s response to Jim Jordan is a wow.
Georgia on our minds
There will be cameras in the courtroom. I hope he’s ready for his close-up.
Another indictment
Of you-know-who.
Lisa Desjardins, Geoff Bennett, and Paul Offitt on RFK Jr.
Disease, death, and RFK Jr. Against disinformation.