Censorship of hate speech doesn’t violate the “marketplace of ideas” principle. That concept assumes you’re talking about rational ideas, not incitement to hatred and violence. If someone enters a marketplace and starts making false accusations about a vendor and whipping the crowd into such a frenzy he can’t do business — or inciting them to overturn his stand — THAT’S what suppression looks like. That’s REAL censorship.
Read More
Donald Trump appeared to say many of the right things in his too-little, too-late reversal after inciting his followers to storm the Capitol. But he didn’t say the only words that mattered, the only words he almost never says. … . Instead, he did what he always does: He threw his supporters under the bus.
Read More
If you’ve ever had your home burglarized (I have), you know what that feels like. You feel vulnerable and traumatized and sick to your stomach. You feel like the one place where you’re supposed to feel safe has been compromised: your house. Now the People’s House has been compromised, has been invaded. And all our enemies — the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians — saw exactly how easy it was.
Read More
Donald Trump has shown time and again that he’s a human toxic waste dump, sabotaging everything he touches. His six bankruptcies are proof of that. But one of his biggest failures foreshadowed his current attempted takedown of the Republican Party — and the nation — almost perfectly. Unfortunately, it happened 35 years ago, so a lot of people have forgotten it..
Read More
For many, Donald Trump’s call with Mark Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, seemed like something out of The Twilight Zone, but to realize just how bonkers crazy it was, let’s apply the Mad Libs method to a portion of the transcript and substitute a few words and phrases at key points. The rule I followed was that all nouns had to relate somehow to science fiction, fantasy, or horror — all of which apply to the current administration’s claims about border fraud.
Read More
News “stories,” such as they are, often consist of an introductory paragraph or two, followed by a long string of screen-shot tweets under a generic headline that contains the words “Twitter reacts to” or something similar. This is not journalism. … It’s just copying stuff down. There’s no storytelling, no background, and very little context. Why should anyone bother even reading it instead of reading, well, Twitter?
Read More
