We know that time and money spent on video games is surging due to the pandemic. Now, industry-tracking firm The NPD Group is providing detail on where that growth is coming from. From a report: And it turns out that people across all age demographics are playing more games more often. That's big for mobile games, but it also includes Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox. In its "2020 Evolution of Entertainment" report, NPD found that 4-out-of-5 consumers in the U.S. played a game in the last six months. More important for the industry, those consumers are spending 26% more time and 33% more money on games than the same period in the previous year. But this isn't just coming from young people. Older demographics are turning to games more often as they find themselves with money they can no longer spend on dining out or attending live events. Spending on video games for Americans 45 years old-to-54 years old increased 76%. People age 55-to-64 increased their spending 29%.
This kid’s parent is clearly up on layering technology. | iStockphoto/Getty Images
Tips for braving the pandemic when it’s also very cold, from an arctic researcher.
This winter is going to suck. We know this because the rest of this year has sucked, but we also know this because the main respite from the suckiness was summer — for those living in much of the northern hemisphere, warmer weather meant that it was far more pleasant to be outside, where the coronavirus is less likely to spread.
What we do know, however, is that if you need to leave your home, it’s much safer to be doing activities outside than inside somewhere else. That means that many Americans are going to need to learn how to deal with, and dress for, cold weather.
Luckily, there are people who are experts in this particular area, for whom brutally cold environments are just part of the job. Cathy Geiger is a professor at the University of Delaware, and has studied the behavior of sea ice at both the arctic and Antarctic poles for more than three decades.
Having worked on 10 polar expeditions, Geiger’s seen a lot (including some gross frostbite stuff that involves eyelashes; we’ll get to that). For the sake of clarity, because layering for sub-zero temperatures is pretty complicated, the following information will be distilled via a handy question-and-answer format.
What’s the best layering method?
There are a couple main tenets of layering that Geiger adheres to. The first and most important of them is to wear lots of loose layers — the key word here being “loose.” That’s because the insulated air that circulates between each layer is what’s actually keeping you warm. The more active you plan to be, the fewer layers you should wear.
Another important tip she stresses is that good body circulation is the key to warmth. “If you’re wearing 700 layers and you’re like the Michelin man and you can’t move, all that padding isn’t going to do you any good if you block off your circulation,” she explains. “[If you wear] four pairs of socks stuffed in a boot, your toes are going to get frostbite because everything’s too tight. There’s no blood down there.”
Robert Harris
Cathy Geiger, 200 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, on an expedition in 2007. “Notice the use of a baseball-type cap.”
When Geiger goes on an expedition where temperatures can plunge between 30 degrees and 40 degrees below zero, she usually layers about four pairs of oversized long johns in moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics or merino wool, a Dickies bib, a Turtle Fur for her neck and face, and at least three pairs of gloves (the thinnest layer goes on first, the military surplus ones go on last), topped with Carhartt coveralls and knee pads. Over that, she wears an extra-large L.L. Bean extreme-weather coat shell.
“The shell stops the cold from breaking through, so it’s just like weatherizing your roof: Your body is a personal shelter. In really cold weather, you want to wrap your body like you would insulate your house.”
What are the best fabrics to use to shield from wind and cold, and how should I layer them?
Conventional wisdom says to keep away from cotton, because it has virtually zero moisture-wicking properties. Instead, Geiger says, make sure that the fabric closest to your skin is made of synthetic fabrics or merino wool.
Why are moisture-wicking fabrics so important? “Sweat is what will kill you,” she says. “The big thing to do is [move] slower than you think. Once you get into the zero digits, you don’t want to start running around and warm up so much that you break a sweat.”
And regardless of how you feel about Canada Goose, they’ve done hoods right. Geiger recommends hoods with fur (or faux fur) trim because “fur creates friction that holds back the wind.”
What’s the best way to protect my skin from the elements?
You should always be wearing sunblock on your face, but before heading out into a snowy environment, there’s one place that people might miss: the underside of their nose. “Snow reflects!” she warns. Once you’re back inside, go for the usual suspects that promise to moisturize: heavy lotions, balms, and Vaseline.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Commuters in downtown Chicago on January 31, 2019.
Do hats really matter?
Yes! And they require their own layering methods, too. While you probably won’t be wearing goggles during your commute to work, you can still rely on the tenets used by arctic researchers to protect your eyes and face.
“If you put on a baseball cap and [then] a snow hat, the ball cap creates a brim, [and] it’s amazing how much sun that blocks,” she says. “It’s a great wind blocker.” Another handy use for baseball caps: When you wear sunglasses, the brim traps the heat that would have been lost through the top of the shades.
And now is the portion of the conversation where Cathy told me something truly wild; in order to properly describe it, I have included the full transcript:
The eyeball is really a serious place where you do not want things to freeze.
Wait, how do your eyeballs freeze?
You’ll notice it because you’ll realize your eyelashes are starting to freeze.
What?
We’ve had situations where people have gone, “Oh my god, what did I just do? Please look at me.” There was a little bit of tearing because when the wind blows really hard in your eye you will start to tear, and then that can cause your eyelashes to freeze. If you try to open [your eyes] too fast, you can actually rip the eyelashes out.
Oh my god!
That’s happened to a friend. When you’re talking -20, [you see] freezing of contact lenses and tearing your eyelashes out because they’ve frozen together. If that happens, the first thing you do is leave your eyes closed. If you have sunglasses or anything on, take them off and put your mittens right over your eyes. Warm it up before you try to open your eyes and rip your eyelashes off.
———-
So yes, hats matter.
My feet get really sweaty if I wear bulky socks. What’s the best way to layer on your feet?
Remember the thing about loose layers? That’s important here, too. “If you’re really, really, really cold, you actually want your feet to be in something so loose that your boot’s moving around a bit,” says Geiger. She never puts on more than two layers of socks (any more and your feet will slide around too much): a moisture-wicking one closest to the skin, followed by a thicker wool pair. And obviously, wear a waterproof boot because, once again, “wet will really kill you.”
ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
A woman walking in Brooklyn on January 31, 2019.
What stupid things do people do in the cold that they really shouldn’t?
Strangely enough, one of the worst mistakes people often make is more mental than physical. “If you’re excited and you’re tense, you’re going to block your circulation,” she says.
Instead, the key is to warm up before you go outside. “Saunas exist from northern cultures for a really good reason,” she explains. Try drinking warm soup broth before heading out rather than coffee or tea, because “tea makes you pee.”
How do I know if I’m getting frostbite? And what do I do about it?
Your first warning that you’re getting too cold is how your fingers and toes feel, since they’re the farthest from your heart. “When I was taking students out on the ice, that’s the first thing I’d ask: ‘How’s everybody’s fingers and toes? All 10? All 20?’ I wanted them to feel that they can count all 20 digits because they’re your remote sensors.”
Geiger stresses that cold extremities need to be tended to immediately. If your hands and feet are starting to hurt, stop what you’re doing and warm them up, either by going inside or using the tools available to do so (there are strategies used by fisherman and the Inupiat people of Alaska that involve using one’s own snot and/or pee that hopefully you will never have to use). Any sign of “bleak white skin,” she adds, also means that blistering may have already started.
So, uh ... what’s happening with the sea ice?
One of the most shocking things Geiger said was that though she’s been working on sea ice for decades, within the last 10 years it’s gotten so thin that it’s unsafe to camp there.
NOAA via Getty Images
A satellite image of the polar vortex in 2014 that covered the entire northern US.
“I’ve been on the sea ice since 1984 and in those days it was great. We just took a boat up there, walked on the ice, and worked on it. 2007 was the last time we could really just camp on the ice. Since 2007, the ice is too dangerously thin to go out and just work on it anymore. You’ve got to work on a boat.”
And yet despite how politicians may feel about the term “climate change,” this, unfortunately, does not mean that it is not happening. Geiger explains that because the planet is warming so quickly, the temperate climates that many people currently inhabit will someday not exist at all.
“The fact is that as the poles get warmer, things get wavier, and as things get wavier, the tropics and the poles are all that we have left, and we don’t have that nice, cozy, temperate, moderate climate,” she says.
“And I think, if the news could communicate that, people would say like, ‘Holy expletive. There’s no temperate zone anymore?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s the consequence of the poles warming faster than the tropics — you lose the temperate zone. And once you do that, that really does make life miserable.” Which is to say, the coronavirus isn’t the only extremely depressing part of this winter.
Hello everyone. Originally, this post was supposed to be devoted to the year 1978, however something came up, and by something, I mean this 2.2 million-dollar, 5,420 sq ft 4 bed/4.5 bath house in Colt’s Neck, NJ.
You see, usually, when a listing goes viral, I’m content to simply retweet it with a pithy comment, but this house genuinely shook something in me, genuinely made me say “what the (expletive)” out loud. It is only fair to inflict this same suffering onto all of you, hence, without further ado:
Looks normal, right? Looks like the same low-brow New Jersey McMansion we’re all expecting, right? Oh, oh dear, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Guess who’s making a list and checking it twice?
Guess who’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice?
Guess who’s coming to town?
Guess who’s coming to town to drag your ass into hell?
A gentle reminder that it is not yet Thanksgiving.
But oh. Oh. It continues:
If you’re wondering what’s happening here, you’re not alone, and sadly there is no convenient way to find out via a kind of haunted house hotline or something.
I can’t even label these rooms because frankly I’m not even sure what they are. All I am sure of is that I want out of them as soon as humanly possible.
How is it that a room can simultaneously threaten, frighten, and haunt me? Me, of all people!
My eyes do not know where to go here. They go to the window, they go to the fireplace, they go to the massive mound of fake plant and statuary currently gorging on the leftmost corner of the room, they go to my hands, which are shaking.
“Hello, I would like to get in touch with the Ministry of Vibes? Yes, I’ll hold.”
I haven’t been this afraid of a shower since I went to Girl Scout camp in the fifth grade and there was a brown recluse spider in the camp shower and I screamed until the counselor came in and told me it was only a wolf spider but it turns out those still bite you and it hurts.
I love watching Still Images on my Television Set :)
Nobody make a sound. He’s watching you.
i spy with my evil eye:
:)
Their souls are trapped in these photographs forever :)
Okay, phew, we made it out alive. Here’s the back of the house I guess.
Well, I hope you’re as thoroughly disturbed as I am. Seriously, I’m going to have trouble sleeping. I mean, I already have trouble sleeping, but this is just making that existing problem so much worse.
There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including: good house of the month, an exclusive Discord server, weekly drawings, monthly livestreams, a reading group, free merch at certain tiers and more!
Not into recurring donations but still want to show support? Consider the tip jar! (Tips are much appreciated since I am making a cross country move in two weeks!!!)
Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store! Proceeds from the store help protect great buildings from the wrecking ball.
Researchers have made a major breakthrough using artificial intelligence that could revolutionize the hunt for new medicines. The scientists have created A.I. software that uses a protein's DNA sequence to predict its three-dimensional structure to within an atomâ(TM)s width of accuracy. weiserfireman shares a report: The achievement, which solves a 50-year-old challenge in molecular biology, was accomplished by a team from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is part of Google parent Alphabet. Until now, DeepMind was best known for creating A.I. that could beat the best human players at the strategy game Go, a major milestone in computer science. DeepMind achieved the protein shape breakthrough in a biennial competition for algorithms that can be used to predict protein structures. The competition asks participants to take a protein's DNA sequence and then use it to determine the protein's three-dimensional shape. Across more than 100 proteins, DeepMind's A.I. software, which it called AlphaFold 2, was able to predict the structure to within about an atom's width of accuracy in two-thirds of cases and was highly accurate in most of the remaining one-third of cases, according to John Moult, a molecular biologist at the University of Maryland who is director of the competition, called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP. It was far better than any other method in the competition, he said.
Gerardo Gutierrez, 70, died alone from COVID-19 in April. He contracted the virus at work in a Publix grocery story deli. Early in the pandemic, he asked his employer to allow him to wear a mask at work. According to Gutierrez’s family—who have filed a wrongful death suit—Publix refused his request. The chain eventually changed its stance to allow employees to wear masks, but it was too late for Gutierrez, whose adult children had to say goodbye to him on a video call. The lawsuit they brought last week includes numerous complaints made by Publix employees to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about the refusal of the grocer to allow them to use masks and gloves because they didn't want to cause shoppers to panic.
"This is a case that needs to be prosecuted and that we need to push forward in our court system and shed light on what Publix was doing and why they were doing it," the family’s attorney, Michael Levine, told the Tampa Bay Times. "The fact the they would chose profits over employees is shameful and disappointing." It is shameful and disappointing and it's how corporate America—with a big assist from Senate Republicans—operate. One of the primary poison pills for COVID-19 stimulus Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to budge from is blanket liability protections for employers like Publix to prevent suits like the Gutierrez's. Or the suit from the family of the late Isidro Fernandez, who was killed by the virus after contracting it in a Tyson pork processing plant in Iowa—the plant where supervisors and managers were allegedly placing bets on how many workers were going to get sick. McConnell would let them all entirely off the hook, but even worse, he has been using it to hold essential relief for millions and millions of Americans hostage for months.
It's been 198 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 62 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill. With the election over, McConnell is forcing the lame duck Senate to confirm more judges. He will also allow a government funding bill to avoid a shutdown—the two outstanding Senate races in Georgia give him incentive to at least prevent that from happening.
Coronavirus stimulus, however, remains stalled. Pelosi is insisting on the state and local government aid that those entities are clamoring for and McConnell is insisting that corporations like Publix and Tyson literally get away with murder. But "both sides" are to blame, don't you know. Meanwhile, we're barreling toward the end-of-the-year cliff when CARES Act programs, including expanded unemployment insurance and eviction moratoriums, expire. The hope of effective vaccines is welcome, but there're weeks and weeks of suffering ahead before it gets to the majority of the population. The need is now.
Senator-elect Mark Kelly will be sworn in on Wednesday at noon when he becomes Sen. Mark Kelly, dropping Sen. Mitch McConnell's majority by one vote, 52-48. That's one vote closer to President-elect Joe Biden being able to repair the damage done to the federal judiciary by McConnell and Trump, and highlight how absolutely essential it is that Democrats win the two Senate seats in Georgia. Because without them, the McConnell blockade will be back.
The usual suspects among Republicans—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney—say they'll allow Biden's Cabinet picks, but judicial nominees are a whole different ball game, being McConnell's single focus. Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democrat who is vying for the top slot on the Judiciary Committee after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (finally) ceded that spot, is not optimistic, telling Politico that Biden will have "very little" impact on the judiciary if Democrats don't get the Senate. "If the last two years of the Obama administration were any indication, they'll freeze them out," Durbin said. "Hope springs eternal but I believe in history." That's a welcome embrace of reality, at least.
Not all Democrats are there yet. Witness Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, close friend of Biden, who remains doggedly obtuse about the nature of Republicans, and particularly McConnell. "Joe Biden ran for president on bringing us together and making the Congress work again as one of his core priorities," Coons told Politico. "If anyone can sit down and work out with [McConnell] … a way to come to an agreement that we will move nominees, it's President-elect Biden. I have lived through years and years of McConnell's obstruction. I know this will be a challenging task."
As long as McConnell has a core of would-be 2024 hopefuls—and he does—he's not going to be bending, even if he wanted to. And two of the really abhorrent contenders are on the Judiciary Committee: Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. "I imagine they'll have a tough time just because I'm not going to vote for people who I think are, to use my words, 'judicial imperialists,'" Hawley told Politico, pretending like there was any kind of principle behind his far-right extremism. There is not. As his next sentence demonstrates. "But maybe he’ll surprise me if [Biden] is indeed the president, who knows, maybe he’ll send up nominees who are constitutionalists and textualists. I kind of doubt it." Biden is the president-elect. Trump lost. So that's where the core of McConnell's GOP is right now.
There are just 59 vacancies in the judiciary right now because of McConnell's three-year conveyer belt of confirmations. He's got 36 nominees in the pipeline now and wants to jam them all through in the lame duck. Even with the two Georgia seats potentially flipping, Biden is not going to be able to reform the courts, at least not in his first two years. But those two years—before the next midterms and another defensive year for Republicans in the Senate—could bring another Supreme Court nominee and any number of vacancies that could open through retirements. Which means Biden needs the Senate. Period.
Editor’s Note:The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
Thinking too hard about saliva can really ruin a nice meal. And to eat inside a restaurant in 2020 requires ignoring the harsh reality of drool: the residue left behind by a chip dipped in a shared bowl of guacamole, the flecks of spit flung loose by a drunken laugh, and the veritable makeout session that is sampling someone else’s cocktail.
The unfortunate ubiquity of mucus is why restaurants, it brings me no pleasure to report, are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus. Indoor public places, including restaurants, played a significant role in the spread of COVID-19 this spring, according to scientific analyses of cellphone data. In a September study, people who tested positive for COVID-19 were more than twice as likely as those who tested negative to report eating in a restaurant recently. Talking with someone who has COVID-19 for 30 minutes or longer—about the time between your bloomin’-onion appetizer and molten-chocolate dessert—more than doubles your odds of catching it.
So why on earth would anyone eat inside a restaurant right now?
This is the question I mulled as I walked up and down the Crystal City strip in Virginia last week, dressed in a mask and an Ann Taylor sweater. I had journeyed to this chunk of suburban Washington, D.C., near the Pentagon, because, despite its concrete-y soullessness, it has the advantage of being home to several restaurants in a row. And they are popular restaurants—not your TGI Fridays, but not your two-tables-and-a-vegan-tagine either. In all, I approached and interviewed about a dozen random people as they walked out of restaurants in Crystal City, and later in another little patch of Northern Virginia called the Mosaic District, a mixed-use development off a giant highway.
These were not anti-mask COVID-19 deniers; people were clearly following the official rules. Nearly everyone on the street wore a mask, including the diners as soon as they exited their restaurant of choice. A man watching TV from the bar inside a Thai place had a mask on. So did the women walking down the street talking about their pharmacy-school applications.
Still, lots of people were eating indoors, even though it was a balmy, 66-degree night in early November. Unless you’re extremely plugged into the public-health world, there’s little reason you would pause before eating inside. Many of the places I passed had signs outside announcing We’re Open! Like 44 other states as of this writing, Virginia hadn’t banned eating indoors, even though the day after my interviews there were 14 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people in Fairfax County and 17 in Arlington. That’s well over the 10-per-100,000 measure that Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me recently was her ceiling for socializing indoors with friends and family only.
Outside McCormick & Schmick’s, a chain seafood place, I stopped three men who had just had a business dinner together. They refused to give me their full names, so I’ll identify them by the color of their masks.
These three seemed relatively unconcerned about the virus. One of them, Red Mask, said he was still going to the gym; Blue Mask said he had gone to the barber recently and was impressed with how long his hairdresser spent wiping down his chair. (This is largely for show; surfaces are now thought to be less important to the spread of the virus than aerosols and droplets from other people). Black Mask told me that he was willing to go into any open restaurant. “I’m not in a high-risk category, so if I got it, it wouldn’t bother me that much,” he reasoned.
They asked me, somewhat aggressively, if I would eat inside a restaurant. I said I probably would not. And then of course I sounded weird, because why wouldn’t you eat in a place that’s open?
Each of us, to get through this terrible time, has clung to some coronavirus factoid or another that we believe protects us. Here’s mine: The odds of catching the coronavirus are about 20 times higher indoors than outdoors. This year I have eaten on patios, in backyards, and on benches outside. But I haven’t sat down inside a restaurant since March, and probably won’t for many more months. “Indoor eating and bars and coffee shops are among the riskiest activities you can do. Outdoors is dramatically better,” says Alex Huffman, an aerosols researcher at the University of Denver.
Several of the restaurant patrons I talked with didn’t share this belief. One man, Steve Harris, even suggested that he was taking a bigger risk talking with me outdoors, with a mask on, than he was eating indoors, without a mask. (Our conversation was much less risky, but I felt awful nonetheless.) Think about when you’re standing on a back patio at a friend’s house, he said, just having a couple of beers, and the sun is setting. You can see peoples’ spit glimmer as it flies out of their mouth into the twilight air. Disgusting, right? Probably more disgusting than having a Blue Creek cheeseburger at Ted’s Montana Grill in November 2020. (Except that indoors, these speech droplets stay in the air for eight to 14 minutes. Not everyone would know this, because Donald Trump and his coronavirus advisers constantly spread incorrect information about the virus.)
Most people told me that they wouldn’t eat at just any restaurant; they’d have to see “precautions” in place. Peoples’ desired precautions ranged from the waitstaff wearing masks to air purifiers to seeing tables spaced apart with partitions separating them. One couple told me, charmingly, that during the pandemic they will eat only in restaurants they are already “familiar with,” as though knowing your way around a menu can protect you from an invisible virus.
The thing is, the precautions restaurants advertise aren’t all very effective, according to experts. One woman who was dining out with her boyfriend told me that she likes to see temperature checks at restaurants. That makes sense, because retail establishments have been ostentatiously taking their patrons’ temperatures for months now. But temperature checks are security theater; not everyone who has COVID-19 has a fever, and a fever can be caused by something other than COVID-19. Measures such as spacing tables apart and installing air purifiers can be helpful, experts told me, but they can’t eliminate the risk entirely. Partitions don’t do much, Huffman says: “They could actually help the aerosol pool on one side of it by disrupting the whole ventilation flow.”
Near the Mosaic District, Silver Diner displayed a sign that claimed the establishment was Making Indoor Dining Like Outdoors, in part through the use of ultraviolet lights, both inside its HVAC system and beaming toward surfaces. Do Hyung Kim, who had just finished up a meal with his wife inside the diner, told me that the UV lights made him feel safer, since he had read about them in the newspaper. But two experts I spoke with said there’s still not much evidence that UV lights prevent infection. “The data behind that is not definitive,” said Tom Tsai, a health-policy professor at Harvard.
Why are people willing to risk it all for a T-bone? In general, humans tend to fall victim to “comparative optimism,” in which we believe that bad things are more likely to happen to other people. There’s still a relatively low likelihood of contracting COVID-19 during any given restaurant outing, but “people aren’t particularly good at perceiving that kind of risk,” says Toby Wise, a researcher at Caltech who has studied coronavirus risk perception.
People don’t learn from statistics, such as cases per 100,000, but rather from their own experiences, says Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and the author of The Biggest Bluff, about the psychology of gambling. Eating at restaurants is comforting and familiar, which breeds “overconfidence and the downplaying of downside risk,” she says. How could something so fun hurt us? Plus, it’s not like authority figures are telling us to stay out of restaurants. “When there’s a muddled message, you don’t err on the side of safety,” Konnikova says. “You err on the side of desire, especially if you’re tired of quarantine.”
Though some of my interviewees were drawn to the soft glow of a noodle joint because of their boredom at home or their desire for a date night, others were venturing out for the good of the restaurants themselves. With no additional coronavirus aid coming, “the money we just spent in there is gonna make sure that people are employed,” a man named Mark told me in Crystal City. “It’s absolutely important for all of us, if we’re comfortable, that we should do that. Because I’ll tell you what: The economy is our most important asset in our country.” This is the bind the government has put us in: Risk your life to eat inside a beloved restaurant, or it might not exist when this is all over.
I asked all the people I spoke with whether they would be angry at government officials, the restaurant, or any other powers that be if they caught COVID-19 from eating indoors. They all said they wouldn’t be. After all, restaurants are just one of the many types of businesses that remain open; they could have contracted it anywhere.
In part because our leaders have let the virus spread uncontrolled, it sometimes seems like it is an unstoppable threat and, like the weather, there’s not much you can do about it. That thinking can lead to a certain kind of fatalism. When I talked with Gabrielle Velasco and George Kosmidis, a young couple outside a Spanish restaurant called Jaleo, Kosmidis said he was still going into an office regularly. So “I think there’s a level of risk no matter what you do,” he said. Velasco added that she was nevertheless frustrated with the overall government pandemic response. If you think about it, she said, the service staffers, who work in close quarters all day, are taking on a bigger risk than the diners are. Why not risk a little when other people are risking so much?
Reached for comment about the state’s indoor-dining situation, a spokesperson for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said he “is working closely with state and local health experts, and he will continue to base his decisions in data, science, and public health.” A few days after my interviews, Northam announced that he would require restaurants to stop serving alcohol after 10 p.m. and to close by midnight. Of course, how much time people spend inside restaurants before then is still entirely up to them.
A small gathering of 10 people or fewer can seem like a low-risk activity, and at the individual level, it’s lower risk than going to a big birthday party. But when a lot of people everywhere are gathering, small or large, the collective risk goes up. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth and Elena Mejía illustrate the reasoning.
The collective part is where many seem to get tripped up. “Flattening the curve” only works when everyone works together. Lower your risk, and you lower the collective risk. You’re helping others. You’re helping those you care about.
more grifters on the right? I'm shocked, just shocked I tell you!
QAnon "was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the 'Q' posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon's spread and the originators' financial gain..." reports NBC News, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo .
"NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon 'research.'"
In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of "Q," the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.
Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q's mysterious posts...
Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the "anon" genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon [real name: Coleman Rogers] and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz's blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News. "A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops," Furber said in an email... As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well... Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts. Diaz's YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter.
Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube "research" as her sole source of income. Diaz declined to comment on this story. "Because I cover Q, I got an audience," Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.
To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and "normies," who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in her blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community... Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon's eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups...
As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, and the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet's conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group. Recently, some Qanon followers have accused Diaz and Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz and Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing to a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers and Diaz may have been involved in the theory from the start.
Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers to both deny that they are Q and say they don't know who Q is.
(702): Is she talking about a testicle cuff or just a cock ring? How did you meet this girl?
(725): Is there a big difference?
(702): It’s about the same as the difference between a night of drunken sex with a stripper at the Bellagio and being robbed and left for dead by a crystal meth tweaker.
And all the GOP suckers deserve to be parted from their money if they're this stupid. Personal responsibility, right?
The notion of Donald Trump "creating" a new "news network," as his allies keep vaguely threatening, is a pipe dream. It's not going to happen. It would require enormous amounts of money he doesn't have, and it would require work. If the so-called Trump administration has taught us anything, it is that Donald Trump cannot stand doing work. He likes people praising him, and he likes golf. Time spent reading, or planning, or attending meetings is time not being spent polishing his boots or his golf clubs, and does not happen. Trump has shown obsessive interest in exactly one subject outside of himself, and that is interior decorating. The man has opinions on drapes and what color they should be; if he were to head up a network on anything, it would be a network featuring Donald Trump's Home Decorating Tips.
And given that every episode of every show would consist solely of Donald telling someone to paint something gold, the viewership might be a bit ... limited.
That said, it does seem to be true that wealthy Trump-adjacent conservatives are scoping out the creation of a new conservative news network to challenge Fox. The stories are always the same: Donald Trump's enablers and supporters are outraged, positively outraged, by Fox News slip-ups in which cold, hard reality manages to make it to airwaves. They didn't become Donald Trump supporters to hear about the effectiveness of masks, or come face-to-face with Electoral College numbers that suggest Dear Leader is not, in fact, going to be able to continue Dear Leadering much longer.
The Wall Street Journalbrings us the latest entry in the saga, a piece reporting that a Trump-supporting actual rich dude's private equity firm had been probing whether to acquire pro-Trump outfit "Newsmax TV," the video version of one of the more notorious conspiracy websites on the conservative internets. This comes after Rich Dude Company had previously set its sights on the absolutely batshit insane conspiracy network OANN, a QAnon-level den of crackpottism that has seen heavy promotion by Trump during the periods when Trump is angriest at Fox News for the aforementioned slip-ups.
This doesn't have anything in particular to do with Trump, mind you. This is a conservative project that just happens to be spearheaded by the sort of people that admire Donald Trump and Donald Trump's own devotion to propaganda, and they want themselves a taste.
Again: A Donald Trump news network? Not going to happen. An archconservative conspiracy network that Donald Trump licenses his name to, as if the news were a mail-order steak? Mayb—yeah, no. He would demand a fortune, and any new startup looking to compete with Fox News is not going to be so well-funded as to be able to afford Donald's special brand of cash-siphoning.
What the continued murmurs around a new "conservative" Fox competitor suggests, though, is that wealthy conservatives have learned at least one big lesson from the Trump era, and they are very eager to capitalize on it. Donald Trump's campaign, administration, reelection bid and subsequent whine-fest have proven, conclusively, that there is a massive American market for straight-up propaganda. Literal fake news.
Conservatives are now angry enough at the normal, everyday wounds inflicted by life and the news cycle that they are all but demanding to be given hoaxes instead. This isn't the bending of reality that Fox News hosts eased audiences into over two decades, with its inside language and large classroom-borrowed chalkboards describing tenuous-to-imaginary links between designated enemies; what Trump, his parade of press secretaries, spokescreatures, Cabinet members and hangers-on proved was that even government figures could lie, brazenly and outright, and allied conservatives would not just accept it but eagerly celebrate it. It is now something akin to a cult, in which all involved likely know the difference between truth and fiction, but insist on adhering to the fictional versions out of sheer spite.
To you and I, this sounds like a problem. To a wealthy media conservative, this is the stuff that makes eyeballs turn to dollar signs. The Americans who gathered themselves around Trump, as movement, are self-selected to be the most gullible—willingly gullible!—people in the nation. These are the people Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and other conservative linchpins have turned into steady paychecks, and who still come back for more.
These people are not poor. These people are obsessively sectarian, and make decisions not just over products, but over which dimension they choose to inhabit, based on who waves the proper flag and how shamelessly they do it.
These conservatives are an advertiser's dream audience, and absolutely everybody in conservative media wants a piece of them.
One of the more defining features of conservative media is, ahem, the advertising that is invariably attached to it. Reading a far-conservative website or listening to a far-right host inevitably means being exposed to a barrage of specifically conspiracy-minded products sold with the language of a hundred doomsdays to come. Buy gold, yes, but also this survival food or this protein shake concoction. Purchase "tactical" flashlights, or an array of other products all themed around something-something-guns. It all inevitably decays into being added to mailing lists in which the names of top conservative hosts are attached to the seediest, scummiest-seeming products one can imagine.
Short version: Conservatism has carefully bred itself into a movement that will believe anything and everything, and while that may be a disaster for the country, to conservative advertisers this is truly a new golden age. You can do anything and these people will still latch on to you.
Forget the controversy about wearing masks or not wearing masks during a deadly nationwide pandemic. The reason wealthy conservatives are rushing to create a new, even farther-right version of Fox News is because Trump discovered an audience of Americans who would eagerly let you harvest their kidneys if you told them it was to defeat "antifa."
American flags? We've sold the hell out of American flags, everyone now has six of them. But now there's a new American flag, and it's blue, or it's yellow, or it has Trump's orange mug painted onto it. You're not a real conservative unless you buy twelve of those too.
For certain, there is an obsession in the far-right with creating the next Fox News. But it's not about patriotism. It's not even about conservatism. It's about good old-fashioned profit. It's about finding the motherlode of American gullibles, people who will buy anything, and selling it to them.
Bleeding. Them. Dry.
That's why Rich Guy Equity Group has been combing the land looking for entry points into the land of Conservative Conspiracy Television. It's not because the man or like-minded allies are just that devoted to Donald Trump. Donald could be eaten by a Florida gator on the back nine next week and the "movement" would no more tap the brakes than they did when famous Important Conservative Herman Cain died of the pandemic illness he and his band of merry grifters had insisted was little more than a conspiracy against them.
In this new version, conservative media is not about ideology. It can't be—not when the ideology shifts from week to week in accordance with whatever new thing must now be held up as enemy. What Newsmax TV or OANN offers is a news "casino" promising mega-jackpots that never appear to audiences primed to empty their pockets.
The new conservative media is about selling a screaming adrenaline rush so cathartic that you need a special pillow afterward to sleep right. It's an expensive pillow, by God, but it's the only one left not infested with "antifa."
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has made official the changes it proposed to its naturalization test, and suspicions that it was doing it just to trip up applicants was right on the dot, an immigration policy expert says.
“Some of the questions have been made explicitly more difficult—even though there’s no evidence the old test wasn’t challenging enough,” American Immigration Council policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick writes. In other instances, “questions have taken on a subtle political stance.” One guess whose stance.
“One question in particular raises concerns of politicization,” Reichlin-Melnick writes. “On the old test, applicants could be asked ‘Who does a U.S. senator represent?’ The suggested answer was ‘all people of the state.’ On the new test, the suggested answer is ‘citizens of their state.’”
“This is not correct,” he continues. “Members of Congress represent everyone who lives within their district, regardless of citizenship status. It’s been that way since the nation was founded.” But we all know this is the same Trump administration that has fought tooth and nail trying to erase undocumented immigrants the 2020 census, a fight it’s taken all the way to the Supreme Court.
Reichlin-Melnick notes another test change asks a question that I’d like to watch someone like, oh, Trump or maybe Republican Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama answer: “For example, the old test asked, ‘What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?’ The new test asks, ‘What does the Bill of Rights protect?’”
Reichlin-Melnick notes a Biden administration could easily revert the changes (although the same can’t be said of some of the hundreds of other changes the Trump administration has made). Of course, the problem has never been that the test has been too easy for immigrants to pass. The problems have been massive backlogs at USCIS and intentional sabotaging making it harder for immigrants to become naturalized, just to name a few. Read the full piece from Reichlin-Melnick here.
Here's something to ponder along with your dream team picks for President-elect Joe Biden's Cabinet and top officials: Who should he fire first? There are just so many options, and you can thank Republicans for the fact that Biden will be able to jettison some folks, fast. As David Dayen reminds us, the Republican case to try to gut President Obama's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, means that the odious Trump director can be canned summarily by Biden. Because, as they say, elections have consequences.
Republicans tried everything to destroy the CFPB and went to court to have the whole agency invalidated. That didn't work, but the Supreme Court ended up deciding that the director of the agency shouldn't have the scope of power or the protections allowed under the law. So the Supreme Court decided not to do away with the whole agency, but to make sure that the director could be fired at will by the president. Wheeeee! So yeah, Mick Mulvaney's hand-picked successor, Kathy Kraninger, can be gone—just like that.
The Revolving Door Project has scoured the administration to find the people who have to get the boot immediately and who should be demoted. Those they recommend be fired include "Inspectors General, the Directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and, to some degree, United States Attorneys.” As detailed above, no political appointee in the Trump administration can be reasonably assumed to put country over party. To ensure that these offices are working in the public interest from Day One, Biden must start with a clean slate of appointees. Those they want to see demoted from chairmanships to commission membership are the chairs of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). These are people who the president can only fire for "cause," and being a toady to Trump isn't really a cause, though it should be.
There's a whole other set where the chairs traditionally step down with a new administration and who really need to be encouraged to leave. This includes the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Expect to see a lot of petitions to a lot of these people in the coming weeks to encourage them to do the right thing and remove their own sorry asses.
Trump set a new precedent by razing the former Obama administration officials, breaking all previous norms. There are plenty of them that Biden needs to restore, but when it comes to digging out and tossing Trump loyalists and sycophants who have been sabotaging our government for four years, he needs to emulate Trump. If the transition team isn't making their list already, they need to be.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, testifies before the Senate in September 2020. | Graeme Jennings/Getty Images
“A surge super-imposed on that surge”: Fauci warns that the coronavirus pandemic may still get worse.
The United States’ leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned in a Sunday Meet the Press interview that another surge of Covid-19 cases “super-imposed on that surge that we’re already in” might be coming, in large part due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Public health experts have been warning Americans of the risk of congregating for the holiday as the US experiences its worst Covid-19 surge yet — Dr. Jonathan Reiner told CNN Tuesday that Thanksgiving could become “the mother of all superspreader events.” Despite these warnings, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) figures suggest that more than 1 million Americans traveled by plane last Wednesday alone, the highest number since the pandemic began, and many more likely drove to spend Thanksgiving with family.
Already, the US is setting grim new case records — the surge Fauci referred to — and given it takes an average of five to six days for an infected person to display symptoms, new cases due to Thanksgiving infections should begin appearing late this week.
But, as Vox’s German Lopez explained earlier this month, it may be several weeks before the full impact of Thanksgiving celebrations is understood:
With the coronavirus, it takes some time — days, maybe weeks — for someone to go from getting infected to actually getting tested. Then it can take days or weeks for that person to end up at a hospital with serious symptoms. Deaths can take even longer, if treatment fails. All this data is like light from another galaxy that takes time to travel to our eyes: It’s reflective of infections that happened weeks ago, not today or yesterday.
On Friday, the US reported an all-time high of 205,460 new Covid-19 cases in a single day, according to data from the New York Times. Friday was also the first day ever that the US saw more than 200,000 cases, less than a month after it crossed the 100,000 daily case mark for the first time on November 4. On average, the country has reported more than 162,000 cases a day for the last week.
Despite these grim numbers, Fauci told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t want to frighten people, except to say it is not too late at all to do something about this.” Basic public health practices, Fauci said — mask wearing, distancing, and avoiding large gatherings — remain crucial to mitigating the spread of the coronavirus.
WATCH: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells @chucktodd that "it is not too late" to stop the spread of Covid.
Dr. Fauci: "We might see a surge super-imposed on that surge that we're already in." pic.twitter.com/mwJnpqpKaX
President Donald Trump, who himself became infected in early October, has largely ceded the field when it comes to combating the spread of the virus. Trump has repeatedly downplayed the virus and encouraged people to interact with one another as they did before the pandemic, even as Covid-19 ravages the country and Trump’s own White House and presidential campaign.
Since Election Day, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and presidential son Donald Trump Jr. have all tested positive for Covid-19, as well as at least 10 others in the president’s orbit, according to a New York Times tally.
A number of promising vaccines are on the way
The extent of Trump’s engagement with the issue appears to be a fixation on taking credit for recent good news on the vaccine front.
“Another Vaccine just announced. This time by Moderna, 95% effective,” Trump tweeted on November 16. “For those great ‘historians’, please remember that these great discoveries, which will end the China Plague, all took place on my watch!”
Another Vaccine just announced. This time by Moderna, 95% effective. For those great “historians”, please remember that these great discoveries, which will end the China Plague, all took place on my watch!
Separately, Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo in a Sunday interview — his first since losing the election — that “I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years,” an entirely untrue claim.
In short, according to Vox’s Dylan Scott, as the pandemic is “entering its most dangerous period to date, the country’s current leadership — which we are stuck with until January 20 — does not appear to have any plans to do anything about it.”
Trump’s credit-grabbing aside, however, vaccines from AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer — all of which have recently reported positive findings from clinical trials — do present a degree of hope, albeit still distant.
According to White House testing czar Adm. Brett Giroir in a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the US “should have enough vaccine by the end of the year to immunize 20 million Americans and we have to immunize for impact. But the American people have to do the right things until we get that vaccine widely distributed.”
There are still hurdles left to clear in the vaccine race. As Vox’s Umair Irfan explains, clinical trials still need to conclude, and the vaccines still need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, though Moderna and Pfizer both hope to receive emergency use authorizations, or EUAs, allowing their vaccines to be used without full approval.
Even with a EUA, however, there are still logistics questions. Irfan explains:
Once a vaccine gets approved, a global supply chain, from the glass vials that hold the vaccine to the syringes used to inject them, needs to spool up to make huge quantities of the vaccine. Manufacturers will also have to ensure that vaccines remain intact and under strict temperature controls from the factory to the hospitals and clinics where they will be used. The process of manufacturing, distributing, and administering a vaccine could take months.
....
It’s also important to remember that a vaccine is not enough on its own to end the pandemic. Measures like social distancing, good hygiene, and wearing face masks will remain essential to control the spread of Covid-19 until a vaccine is widely available. Public acceptance will also be a major issue, and health officials will have to overcome a rising wave of vaccine hesitancy.
In Wisconsin, increasingly overwhelmed health care workers at the University of Wisconsin published an open letter to residents of the state: “Without immediate change,” they wrote, “our hospitals will be too full to treat all of those with the virus and those with other illnesses or injuries. Soon you or someone you love may need us, but we won’t be able to provide the life-saving care you need, whether for COVID-19, cancer, heart disease or other urgent conditions. As health care providers, we are terrified of that becoming reality.”
As far back as May this year — distant history, in pandemic terms — Dr. Rick Bright, who previously led a US vaccine research agency and now serves on President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, warned that “without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”
President Donald Trump at the White House, after speaking to troops on November 26. | Erin Schaff/Getty Images
The president spread conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, mail-in voting, and more.
President Donald Trump made his first television appearance since losing reelection on Sunday in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures.
Over the course of 45 rambling minutes, Trump, mired in election denialism, used the platform to promulgate a slew of thoroughly disproven lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud, aided and abetted by Bartiromo.
“I was called by the biggest people saying congratulations, political people, congratulations, sir. You just won the election. It was 10 o’clock and you looked at the numbers and I’m sure you felt that way,” Trump falsely told Bartiromo early in the segment when asked about his election fraud claims. “This election was over and then they did [ballot dumps], they call them dumps, big massive dumps in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, and all over.”
Trump whines to Maria Bartiromo about the “massive dumps” he says cost him the election pic.twitter.com/oX2RPPOwbi
In reality, those “dumps” were just mail-in votes being counted — something Trump had been told ahead of the election would add more votes to President-elect Joe Biden’s vote total than to his, in part because he spent the weeks leading up to the election telling his supporters not to vote by mail.
Trump also launched a confused and false attack on the upcoming Georgia Senate runoffs. Set for January 5, the two runoffs will decide control of the US Senate — if Democrats win both, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be able to provide the tie-breaking vote; however, if Republicans win even one, they will maintain a slim majority in the chamber.
“You’re using the same garbage machinery, Dominion, and [voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams is] going around, she’s going around screaming she’s got 800 or 850,000 ballots. What kind of an election is it?” Trump said.
It’s not the first time Trump has attacked the integrity of the Georgia elections — he lost the state in the presidential election, the first time a Republican has done so since George H.W. Bush in 1992 — and as Vox’s Aaron Rupar has explained, those attacks are engendering “remarkably half-baked” efforts by some Republican operatives to encourage GOP voters to sit out the runoffs.
Trump has repeatedly questioned the competency of Georgia’s election officials, casting doubt on their ability to conduct future contests — and has maintained, despite all evidence to the contrary, that voting machines and software made by Dominion Voting Systems changed votes cast for him in order to help Biden. He has been so successful pushing this particular conspiracy theory that Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel was forced to spend part of her trip to the state trying to convince Republican voters that they could trust the process and vote for the GOP Senate nominees in January.
Trump, who spent the last three days golfing at one of his properties and only this Thursday answered a question from the press for the first time since Election Day, also told Bartiromo that he would “use 125 percent of my energy” to prove voter fraud (which, again, has been shown not to exist to any meaningful degree) and overturn the results of the election.
Trump’s fusillade of inane lies, of course, has become more or less par for the course these days, but on Sunday, he wasn’t screaming his conspiracies into the void of Twitter: instead, he had Bartiromo and a national audience.
And Bartiromo didn’t exactly attempt to push back on the president’s assault on the most basic underpinnings of American democracy.
In response to one Trump lie, for example — the president claiming falsely that “there’s no way Joe Biden got 80 million votes ... there’s no way it happened. This election was a fraud and it was a rigged election” — Bartiromo didn’t press for evidence supporting his claim, or call out the lie in real time. Instead, she said that “this is disgusting, and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted,” then moved onto a new topic and offered up some conspiracy theories of her own.
Bartiromo’s acquiescence to Trump’s disinformation peddling is especially striking on the heels of the president’s repeated attacks on Fox News for not being sufficiently pro-Trump.
“@FoxNews daytime is virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Watch @OANN, @newsmax, or almost anything else.”
Whatever the president’s mercurial opinion of Fox, though, the reality bears repeating: Joe Biden won well over 80 million votes, beating out Trump by more than 6 million, and the election was neither a fraud nor rigged. That all happened, no matter what the president says, and Biden will take office in January 2021.
Unfortunately, Trump’s voter fraud rhetoric has taken deep root in the Republican Party. A raft of recent polls — including one conducted by Vox and Data for Progress on November 16 — show that majorities of Republican voters believe there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election (there wasn’t).
In the case of the Vox/Data for Progress poll, fully 75 percent of likely GOP voters agreed that “there was voter fraud during the election that helped former Vice President Joe Biden.”
Trump’s lies aren’t going to stop Joe Biden from taking office
For all of the president’s frantic protestations, he’s quickly running out of time to dispute the election results. States — including Pennsylvania — are beginning to certify their results, and the federal certification deadline is approaching on December 8. After that, the Electoral College will meet on December 14, and Biden will be formally elected the next president.
In both Wisconsin and Georgia — swing states won by Biden — recounts have confirmed the former vice president’s victory. Lawsuits intended to overturn the will of the people in states like Pennsylvania have also been slapped down in courts, with even Trump-nominated judges rejecting his lawyers’ arguments.
One such judge, Stephanos Bibas, wrote in a Friday decision handed down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that “the Campaign cannot win this lawsuit. It conceded that it is not alleging election fraud. It has already raised and lost most of these state-law issues, and it cannot relitigate them here.”
Separately, in Sunday’s interview, Trump told Bartiromo that Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly had “a great case” to invalidate mail-in ballots in the state “because the legislature didn’t make the decision on this stuff.” Not only was Kelly’s case dismissed with prejudice by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Saturday, however, but the president misstated the facts of the case to Bartiromo — the state legislature passed vote-by-mail into law in 2019.
A trip to the US Supreme Court will also likely prove futile for the president, experts say, if any Trump campaign lawsuit makes it that far in the first place. After Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis pledged to appeal the campaign’s Third Circuit loss to the Supreme Court in a tweet Friday, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck pointed out that “any appeal is [dead on arrival],” even with a new 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
"The activist judicial machinery" = three Republican-appointed judges in a *unanimous* opinion written by a *Trump appointee* that literally concludes that "the Campaign cannot win this lawsuit."
The transition to a Biden administration has also officially begun: General Services Administration chief Emily Murphy ascertained the election results Monday after public outcry over the delay, and federal funding has been made available to the Biden-Harris transition team. So as damaging as Trump’s tweets and Sunday interview might be to confidence in American democracy, there’s no reason to believe they will lead to anything but President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.
More than 50 House Democrats are making a formal push for President-elect Joe Biden to select Rep. Deb Haaland as his Interior secretary.
The New Mexico Democrat, who is already being vetted for the position, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in the nation’s history.
“You can make history by giving Native Americans a seat at the Cabinet table for the first time,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter, obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.
The letter, led by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, was delivered to the Biden transition team this week. Grijalva also endorsed Haaland for the post this week in a letter to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The letter was signed by about half of the Democrats on the committee. The signatories include progressives such as Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), as well as members of the moderate Blue Dog Caucus, such as Reps. Jim Costa (D-Calif.) and Ed Case (D-Hawaii).
Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who was elected assistant speaker on Wednesday, making her the No. 4 House Democrat, also signed the letter.
The Interior secretary is charged with the management of public lands as well as the federal government’s relationship with Native nations. Haaland is a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, a federally recognized tribe near Albuquerque, N.M., and she is one of only two Native American women ever elected to Congress.
The Democratic lawmakers’ letter notes that Haaland has “significant experience working and living in Indian Country,” referring to her role as a tribal administrator and an organizer fighting for tribal voting rights.
A group of Native American organizations also sent Biden a letter this week backing Haaland.
At least two other New Mexico Democrats are also considered potential Interior secretary picks: Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich. Udall, who’s retiring from Congress in January, told E&E News on Tuesday that he was on Biden’s short list.
While New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, would fill Heinrich’s seat if Biden tapped him for the post, selecting Haaland would trigger a special election as Democrats prepare to see their majority in the House badly weakened in the next Congress. (Lujan Grisham herself has also been mentioned as a possible Biden pick for Interior secretary.)
House Democrats have said they expect few of their colleagues to be plucked from the Capitol to serve in the Biden administration in the wake of an election drubbing that has given Republicans a net 11 seats so far.
Biden has already announced that Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) will leave Congress to become a top White House adviser to him, but it is unlikely that many of Richmond’s colleagues will follow him into the administration. Democrats will have their smallest majority in decades in January and can’t afford many special elections or even temporary vacancies.
Haaland’s seat, which includes most of Albuquerque, is safely Democratic. But if Biden plucks too many Democrats from the House for his Cabinet, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could face a perilously narrow majority in the months before special elections can be held.
This is sickening. We’ve known that the meatpacking industry has acted with callous disregard for its workers’ lives in the coronavirus pandemic, keeping them on the job in unsafe conditions. But according to a lawsuit by the family of the late Isidro Fernandez, it’s worse than that. At the Tyson pork processing plant where Fernandez worked in Iowa, the family alleges, supervisors and managers placed bets on how many workers would get COVID-19.
That winner-take-all betting pool rooting against the health of workers in the plant was organized by one manager, Iowa Capital Dispatch reports. Another manager called COVID-19 a “glorified flu” and “not a big deal,” and said “everyone is going to get it.” He did his part to make sure everyone got it, too, by at one point ordering a sick supervisor to skip testing and stay at work, because “We all have symptoms—you have a job to do.”
Managers offered attendance bonuses, giving sick workers an incentive to stay on the job, and lied about COVID-19 cases in the plant. At the same time, Tyson and other meatpacking companies were lobbying state governments as well as the Trump administration to get support in staying open and fending off lawsuits.
We shouldn’t have to hear about betting pools to understand how badly the meatpacking industry has treated its workers—its largely immigrant, vulnerable, underpaid workers. The numbers tell the story: tens of thousands of coronavirus cases and hundreds of deaths, at a minimum, and lawsuits and complaints describing disgusting, unsafe practices in the plants. But when you think about it, it makes sense that the managers carrying out policies disregarding the health and safety of their workers and communities would also be putting that contempt into words directed at individuals. A policy that people should keep working even if they’re sick and pressure on individuals to skip testing and work sick go hand in hand. It’s not a giant step from taking it as your job to make people work sick and spread the virus to their coworkers to betting on how successful your push to infect large numbers of people will be.
And all of this was enabled by the Trump administration again and again, with top officials blaming workers for getting sick rather than pointing a finger at managers and forcing the companies to improve safety measures and, in case of serious outbreaks, shut down plants.
Because inflicting damage on a Biden administration is more important than actually helping the economy.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday asked the Federal Reserve to return all unused coronavirus relief funds set aside for its emergency lending programs by the end of the year, taking away a lifeline even as a resurgence in Covid cases threatens to upend the budding economic recovery.
Mnuchin said the programs are no longer needed, but the move goes against the Fed’s desire to keep them going, according to a statement from the central bank, in a rare show of public disagreement between the two government agencies.
“The Federal Reserve would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy,” the Fed said.
The emergency programs, which were set to expire Dec. 31 unless extended, have doled out billions of dollars in loans to keep the economy afloat. Their mere existence helped restore stability to the financial system after panic over the coronavirus earlier this year threatened to shut down key debt markets.
The Fed and Treasury have joint responsibility for designing and authorizing the programs, some of which were created at the behest of Congress in a massive relief package, called the CARES Act, signed by President Donald Trump in March.
In a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Mnuchin described the lending facilities as successful, saying their joint efforts had boosted the ability of large corporations and state and local governments, as well as consumers, to borrow money at reasonable rates from private markets, without needing to turn to the central bank.
“While portions of the economy are still severely impacted and in need of additional fiscal support, financial conditions have responded and the use of these facilities has been limited,” Mnuchin said.
“I was personally involved in drafting the relevant part of the legislation and believe the Congressional intent … was to have the authority to originate new loans or purchase new assets (either directly or indirectly) expire on December 31, 2020,” the Treasury chief added. “As such, I am requesting that the Federal Reserve return the unused funds to the Treasury.”
A Treasury secretary appointed by President-elect Joe Biden would be able to reauthorize the programs upon taking office, but that wouldn’t be until late January at the earliest. It is unclear whether this move will increase pressure on Congress to provide more economic relief.
At a public event this week, Powell said reports that an effective vaccine might soon be coming were “certainly good news” but warned that “the next few months may be very challenging.”
“The Fed will be strongly committed to using all of our tools to support the economy for as long as it takes until the job is well and truly done,” he said. “When the right time comes — and I don’t think that time is yet or very soon — we’ll put those tools away.”
Mnuchin in his letter nodded to “the unlikely event that it becomes necessary in the future to reestablish any of these facilities,” saying that any Treasury chief would be able to use other rainy day funds under the control of the department or could get additional funding from Congress.
He said the unused money, along with unused Treasury funds allocated for airlines and businesses critical to national security, would allow lawmakers to use $455 billion for other purposes.
The move is in line with calls by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the likely chair of the Banking Committee if the GOP holds the Senate, who said the programs had served their purpose. He expressed worry that if they are extended, they would be seen as a substitute for fiscal policy — the tax and spending decisions that are the responsibility of Congress and the president.
“I applaud Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s decision to wind down, by year-end, the CARES Act’s temporary, emergency lending facilities, as Congress intended and the law requires,” Toomey said in a statement Thursday. “These facilities, which were established in response to the unprecedented market turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year, have successfully achieved their intended purpose.”
But Democrats have urged the opposite, calling on the central bank to make the loan terms more generous as the darkening financial outlook for many companies and municipalities heightens the risk that even more Americans will be put out of work.
“Under its contracts with Treasury, the Fed can and should reject the request to return the $195B in CARES Act funds Treasury has already committed,” tweeted Bharat Ramamurti, a former aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who now sits on an oversight panel for these emergency programs. “But this indicates Treasury will force the Fed to shut down key programs at year-end, needlessly eliminating market protection.”
“Luckily, whatever the Trump Treasury does, the Biden Administration has the authority to ask the Fed to restart these lending programs next year,” he added. “And there clearly will still be a need for the small business and state and local lending programs two months from now.”
The largest U.S. business lobby also voiced its displeasure, particularly at the ending of the Fed's “Main Street” lending program designed for midsized businesses and nonprofits.
“A surprise termination of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity programs, including the Main Street Lending Program, prematurely and unnecessarily ties the hands of the incoming administration and closes the door on important liquidity options for businesses at a time when they need them most,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in a statement.
“American businesses and workers are weary of these political machinations when they are doing everything in their power to keep our economy going,” he said.
Mnuchin has approved a 90-day extension for a group of Fed facilities that aren’t connected to the CARES Act funds passed in March. Those programs are directed at short-term business lending, general market functioning, and boosting banks that lent under the government-backed Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses.
2020 was never going to be easy. But it didn’t have to be a dumpster fire.
There’s an alternate timeline in which, amid a global coronavirus pandemic, vast majorities of Americans followed medical experts’ advice. In that timeline, the White House set a clear and simple example: Wear a mask; keep your distance. And then, a hard-fought presidential election ended with a gracious concession speech.
But we don’t live in that world. And there’s a bit of a grand unified theory that explains why 2020 has been so miserable: a particularly noxious strain of masculinity.
Peter Glick, a social psychologist at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has been watching the way Americans relate to one another for decades, and he’s recently seen an uptick in a very locked-in, confrontational version of American manhood. Trump, especially, embodies it—“you can never show a chink in the armor, even if that involves denying reality,” as Glick puts it. And with America confronting a series of challenges—economic dislocation, racial tension, a viral pandemic—this leadership style is both appealing for its strength and utterly destructive in its effects, from the top down.
Take, for instance, mask-wearing during the pandemic: Multiple studies have found that men are more likely to die from Covid-19, but substantially less likely to wear masks or socially distance. Trump himself didn’t wear a mask in public for months, fearing it would make him look weak, and still doesn’t wear one in social settings; many Americans in Trump country go through their lives with the similar feeling: They, too, can’t break the facade.
"One of the strongest prescriptions about masculinity is that you have to show strength. Masculinity is performed publicly. And wearing a mask is a very public act. So once it got portrayed as a sign of weakness ...,” Glick says, trailing off. “Even men who don’t endorse that kind of extreme version of masculinity are still trained, from childhood on, to defend our manhood in some way.”
Or consider the presidential election, which President Donald Trump falsely claims was rigged against him—a suggestion he raised months before any votes were cast.
“In social psychology, there’s this phenomenon called ‘self-handicapping,’ where if you are worried that you’re going to lose—and that would threaten your masculine identity—you set up an obstacle or excuse in advance,” says Glick. “It’s like we’re going to run a race, and you say, ‘Oh, I think I pulled a muscle.’ … That’s that very reactive, ego-driven, ‘win at all costs’ version of masculinity.”
When an organization—whether it’s a small business or a presidential administration—is governed as a de facto “masculinity contest,” Glick says, “it is supremely dysfunctional. And the Trump administration is a textbook example of that.”
Though it’s common to point out that Trump likes to project strength, it’s less common to argue that an extreme concept of masculinity is driving many of the problems we face, and is not just a reaction to them. Most political analysts don’t turn first to “masculinity” when they think about how we got here. To Glick, that’s a mistake: To understand the shape of American politics, we need to understand the social psychology behind it.
To better understand the social psychology that explains how masculinity has shaped 2020, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Glick this week. A condensed transcript of that conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with the big picture. What is the state of American masculinity in 2020?
First off, men are not a monolith, and there’s a variety in the qualities of masculinity we see. But we’re seeing a very reactive masculinity on the part of some men who value a kind of shallow, performative version of masculinity that is all about winning, about dominance, about seeing everything as a zero-sum game, that you can never lose, you can never show a chink in the armor, even if that involves denying reality. That version of masculinity is really problematic—it’s not something completely new—and we see it going on really strongly right now.
I teach at a liberal arts college. We have this “great works”-type course, and one of the books we used to teach was Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” where she talks about the rise of fascism in Europe after World War I. And Woolf put it down to challenges to masculinity—social challenges—and this overreaction with the overassertive kind of self-centered, egocentric, reactive masculinity. She was on the money then. And I think we’re in a similar situation now.
In a lot of the research, we see a similar feeling that masculinity is under siege, that male power is under siege or the hierarchy is being questioned, and there’s this reactive masculinity in response. It’s a trend that actually precedes Donald Trump—and which will continue after him.
Is that sense of threatened masculinity part of what’s driving the refusal to wear masks during the pandemic?
It’s hard to say, but one of the things that’s generally true about masculinity, one of the strongest prescriptions about masculinity, is that you have to show strength. Masculinity is performed publicly. And wearing a mask is a very public act. So once it got portrayed as a sign of weakness …
Men differ in their ideologies about manhood. But when it comes to perceived threats to our masculinity, all of us—gay, straight, liberal, conservative—seem prone to feeling this need to assert our masculinity. It’s not just rabid Trump supporters. Even men who don’t endorse that kind of extreme version of masculinity are still trained, from childhood on, to defend our manhood in some way.
Regardless of their ideology, when you bring guys into the lab and do something to threaten their masculinity—like give them a personality test and tell them they scored more similar to a woman than a man, or, in one experiment, saying “you squeeze that handgrip like a girl”—they all tend to want to restore their manhood. As an example, if my wife wants me to carry her purse while she’s trying on something in a store, we all know that kind of chagrin. It’s hard to avoid some sense of embarrassment or emasculation. Or if you get scared of a spider or a mouse, and your male friends are there, we’re all like, “They’ll never let me forget it.”
Stereotypically, there’s this notion of men as “protectors.” Wearing a mask is being a protector: It protects you—and even more, it protects your family and others from the virus. But that doesn’t seem to be the way a lot of men think about it. Why? Does the desire to avoid seeming weak trump that “protector” idea?
That’s part of it. Often, stereotypes of men are that you should be “bad but bold.” Not that you should be bad, but a certain amount of badness is linked to the boldness. There’s an idea that men are supposed to be “bold” even to the point of recklessness, that they should be physically courageous and do dangerous activities—that that’s how we establish our manhood: by doing reckless things.
When you think about men as protectors and the images we have of heroism, being a protector by wearing a mask doesn’t seem heroic. It’s not running into a burning building or taking a bullet for your girlfriend. It doesn’t have that reckless, courageous component to it. It has this potential connotation of “I’m afraid of a little virus.” It does take courage to wear a mask, especially knowing that, as a man, you might be mocked. But that’s not seen as masculine courage.
Had [mask-wearing] been portrayed differently and you had a critical mass of people [wearing them] and leadership saying you’re “being a man by wearing the mask,” that would’ve helped a lot. But when you have the leadership in a country pumping up [the idea that it’s not masculine to wear a mask], like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Trump in the U.S., it is even harder to change those perceptions. You can do that, it’s just that you’re swimming upstream, especially when there’s so much polarization that we don’t hear people on the other side of the divide as having any credibility.
In terms of polarization, is there a danger with masculinity being grafted onto partisan fights?
Oh, it already has been. Yes. This is not a “danger.” This more extreme, “win at all costs” masculine ideology we’re talking about, that’s very strongly correlated with support for Trump. But it’s something that well precedes him.
For a long time, Republicans have tried to claim the masculine high ground. Trump just took it to a whole other level. I mean, when you have in the Republican primary back in 2016, him essentially debating his penis size, there’s no way to view that other than through this lens of masculinity.
And all the derisive nicknames: “Little Marco.” Well, that’s about being a wimp. “Low-energy Jeb.” That’s about not having stamina and strength. All of the ways Trump derides other politicians are really strongly based in masculine norms and seeing someone else as not being “man enough.”
You mentioned past Republican leaders claiming the masculine high ground. Ronald Reagan embodied a type of masculinity. In many ways, Trump is the total opposite of the traits associated with that sort of classic, 20th-century masculinity. You can’t imagine Reagan being as boastful, or seeking personal acclaim in the same way as Trump, or—
Whining.
Right. How has our notion of masculinity shifted over the years where Trump is seen as ubermasculine while embodying the opposite of those traits?
I go back to that observation that this really reactive reassertion of masculinity happens after it’s been questioned. And I do take seriously this reaction to political correctness. There are people who feel that their identity is being threatened, their ability to say things is being threatened, and they’re being told they’re a bad person. They really like having this champion out there who’s going after the people who they think are making them feel this way—making them feel dismissed and powerless. That’s part of this Trumpian version of masculinity, which is derisive and mocking.
Trump’s masculinity is much more fragile than Reagan’s easy, comfortable performance. There’s still all this stuff about “strength” and “dominance,” but I think we’ve combined it now with political polarization and winning and crushing the competition.
That said, you would think—you know, it’s not masculine to whine ...
Well, whining isn’t seen as masculine, but as you noted, there is this extreme masculine need to win at all costs. And so, with the stakes being so high—it being not just the election, but Trump’s perception as a winner on the line—isn’t his type of masculinity leading to the whining?
Yes, because you can’t admit defeat, as we see right now. Therefore, what’s the alternative explanation? That the election was “rigged.”
In social psychology, there’s this phenomenon called self-handicapping, where if you are worried that you’re going to lose—and that would threaten your masculine identity—you set up an obstacle or excuse in advance. It’s like we’re going to run a race, and you say, “Oh, I think I pulled a muscle.” Or you’re going to take an exam the next day, and you publicly get super drunk: “Oh, I bombed it. I was totally drunk.” You set up excuses in advance.
Certainly, Trump set up this “rigged” notion as an excuse. That’s that very reactive, ego-driven, “win at all costs” version of masculinity. And I think our culture feeds that.
What about Joe Biden? He projects his own sort of masculinity, right?
Well, think about the stories he tells, like Corn Pop. [Biden has described his teenage days working as a lifeguard at a pool in a Black neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware, and facing down a young man nicknamed “Corn Pop” who wielded a razor blade.] They’re all about standing up, being a man. It’s that kind of posturing — like saying that if he’d heard Trump demeaning women as a teen, he would’ve taken him out behind the bleachers and beat the hell out of him. Or challenging Trump to do pushups—it’s a demonstration of stamina, like the video they showed of him and Obama running around the White House.
He’s got that old-school, “I’m masculine, I’m tough” masculinity, and tries to exhibit that. But at the same time, it’s different than the egocentric, narcissistic, reactive masculinity Trump has. As long as you have the common good as the kind of overarching, important value, it tempers that; it changes what that masculine performance is in the service of.
Of course, we can also talk about the kind of benevolent sexism he exhibits. Partly, he’s just a touchy-feely guy. There’s a bit of a benevolent-sexist, paternalistic thing going on in his past behavior toward women. But it doesn’t compete with Trump’s level of [alleged] sexual harassment and [alleged] sexual assault — there’s nothing on that level.
And by the way, Trump tried to attack him on exactly that: That Biden was old, sleepy, confused. And Biden was able to demonstrate enough counterevidence to that.
It sounds like politics is often a type of masculinity contest. As a practical matter, what affect does that have on the country?
We have good research on this. By “masculinity contest,” we mean this zero-sum dominance game that’s all about winning—“winners and losers” and winning at all costs. We know from our research that when organizations operate by these “masculine” norms—strength and stamina, show no weakness, put work first, dog-eat-dog competition, trust no one, dominance—when you get that in an organizational setting, it is supremely dysfunctional. And the Trump administration is a textbook example of that. You get the circular firing squad, you get the lack of trust. For organizations to accomplish organizational goals, you have to cooperate with each other. And the “masculinity contest” is all about dog-eat-dog competition.
When we do our research—not in the Trump administration, but in organizations generally—that’s correlated with all sorts of bad outcomes, like leaders who are kind of narcissistic, hypersensitive, blame everybody else for failures, take credit for all successes. That kind of toxic leader is much more common when there are these masculinity contest values. Sexist behavior is more common. Bullying is more common. Racial and ethnic harassment, all of that. There’s this belittling of other people. It is corrosive. You don’t get a functional group. Everybody’s looking out for number one.
It’s not a long-term or sustainable thing for an organization. It undermines you when you don’t put common good, group goals first. And that’s where we have some leaders who are masculine in their presentation, but actually value the greater good. And that is a big difference.
Trump’s conception of masculinity is like the central guiding principle of Trump. It’s the prime directive: His need to prove his masculinity. The need to win at all costs is set above everything else—and that is doomed to be dysfunctional. And the coronavirus combined the dysfunctionality of a masculinity-contest organization with Trump’s masculine presentation, where he denied the virus was a problem.
The masculinity contest is just so emblematic of where we are. You remember during the solar eclipse? Trump made a point of looking directly at the sun with his naked eye. That’s all like, “I don’t care what the experts say. I’m tough. I’m the guy in charge.” If I’m “the man who decides,” then experts are a threat. It’s like how he thinks he knows better than Dr. Fauci about the pandemic.
If our elections are just masculinity contests to some degree, that really seems like—
Yes. We’re fucked. [Laughter]
That really puts female politicians in a bind. They have to win, but can’t win in quite the same way, and also still have to be seen as likable and kind, or don’t want to be labeled shrill or overly ambitious and so on. How do we navigate that?
There’s some research that suggests that, looking at 2016 votes at the county level and correlating that with indices of sexism, Hillary Clinton would have had an overwhelming victory if not for sexism. It was definitely a factor, but it wasn’t the only factor; there are all sorts of things people might not like about Hillary Clinton. But there was this underlying sexism and a distaste for a woman to be seen as seeking power—and you don’t have to be a rabid sexist to find that distasteful.
[As a political leader,] you have to demonstrate strength. We have that embedded in our views of leadership. And it’s something that some extraordinary women can perhaps navigate and manage, but there are so many pitfalls. I don’t think anybody fully understands exactly how some women pull it off. You want to be seen as genuine and likable. Hillary Clinton was smiling all the time at the debates, and people saw that as fake, and that just fed into this narrative that she wasn’t genuine.
It is a much trickier performance for a woman. To pull it off, men have a whole sidewalk, and women have got a tightrope. You might be able to make it, but it’s just much harder.
Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump, is considering a Senate run in North Carolina, according to two people familiar with her plans.
She is looking at a possible run in 2022, as Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s term comes to a close. Burr has said he will not seek reelection after more than 15 years in office.
Though historically Republican and going for the president this year, North Carolina has increasingly emerged as a swing state, with Trump winning by slightly over than 1 percentage point — considerably closer than in 2016.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis also won reelection for a second term this this year by nearly 2 percentage points against scandal-plagued Democrat Cal Cunningham, an Army veteran and former state senator. It became the most expensive Senate race in history, with the two parties spending nearly $300 million combined, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Republicans currently hold a 50-48 advantage in the Senate, with both Georgia seats in runoff elections on Jan. 5.
Lara Trump, who is married to the president’s son Eric, is a native of the state, hailing from the Wilmington area and obtaining her bachelor's degree from N.C. State University. She also served as a campaign adviser to her father-in-law in 2016 and 2020, and campaigned for the president at North Carolina rallies in the lead-up to Election Day.
Before her political career, she was a television producer for “Inside Edition“ and also worked as a personal trainer and professional chef.
The New York Times first reported her Senate consideration.
North Carolina will likely be one of Democrats‘ top Senate targets next year along with seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as they seek to either win a majority or preserve their control if they manage to win both Georgia runoffs. It‘s not yet clear who would be Democrats‘ top candidate in the race. The state‘s two best-known Democrats, Gov. Roy Cooper and state Attorney General Josh Stein, both won reelection this month even as Joe Biden and Cunningham lost in the state.
A Lara Trump candidacy would upend what is already likely to be a crowded GOP primary to replace Burr. Mark Meadows, the president‘s chief of staff and a former congressman from the state, is considered a potential candidate. Retiring Rep. Mark Walker is also a likely contender after briefly considering a primary challenge to Tillis last year. Former Gov. Pat McCrory and outgoing Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, who lost the governor‘s race, could also be in the mix.
Burr chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, which played a role investigating the president’s ties to Russia and that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The committee was a mostly collegial body in the Russia drama, largely free from the partisan mudslinging that was a constant in its House counterpart.
Enlarge / An aerial view of the Arecibo facility, showing the increasingly fragile cables supporting the instrument platform, as well as the gash caused when one of those cables failed. (credit: University of Central Florida)
Today, the National Science Foundation announced that its famed Arecibo radio observatory would be shut down. Built into a hilltop in Puerto Rico, the main dish of the observatory is over 300 meters across, and its massive size has made it a feature in popular culture ranging from James Bond movies to video games. But despite a long history of scientific contributions, the observatory has been struggling for funding for over a decade, and two cables that support it have failed this year, leaving it in a precarious state.
After engineering studies determined there was no way to repair the hardware without putting workers at risk, the NSF made the decision to shut the observatory down.
More than a big dish
While the sheer scale of the main dish at Arecibo grabbed the most attention, the dish was purely a reflector. The actual business end of the telescope, where radio waves were sensed, was an instrument platform suspended high above it by cables strung from three towers. The instrument platform held a receiver that could be moved to different locations above the disk, giving it the ability to resolve signals from more directions than its fixed dish might suggest.
The fact that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is lower than pond scum in the evolutionary chart of morality is not breaking news. The fact that the Republican senator can be best described as what happens when ambition meets zero morals, the excrement of a warthog, and thimbleful of rhetorical training is not a new thought. The reality is that when the history books are written about this era in politics and American history, Cruz will be remembered best for absolutely nothing. He’s been a worthless legislator and a parasite on Sen. Mitch McConnell’s shell for the entirety of his career. End of story.
Since it has become clear that President-elect Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States, and since, as we speak, COVID-19 numbers are reaching their expertly predicted worst heights, news outlets have dug back a couple of months ago into the archives to find some Republican predictions about these two things. Cruz, because he’s a big bowl of bad ideas and statements, made some pretty bold predictions in July to reporters. While standing mask-free in our nation’s capitol, Cruz told the world that not only were Democratic leaders’ public health measures—closing down schools and businesses to flatten the curve—wrong-headed, they were all a part of a political ploy to win the election. In fact, if (and once) Joe Biden won the election, the ruse would be up. Democratic leaders would reveal the COVID-19 pandemic to be a hoax and would reopen everything. There’s video below the fold of him making this very prediction.
This is, verbatim, what Ted Cruz predicted:
SEN. TED CRUZ: If it ends up that Biden wins in November—I hope he doesn't, I don't think he will—but if he does, I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all of those Democratic mayors will say, “Everything is magically better, go back to work, go back to school.” Suddenly the problems are solved. You won’t to have to wait for Biden to be sworn in.
A person like this cannot be shamed. The depth of their moral deceit knows no bounds.
This is what the GOP and its supporters stand for.
At high noon on Thursday, Donald Trump’s crack legal team sauntered out for a showdown with destiny. They were there to demonstrate for America that Trump’s refusal to concede the election wasn’t a demonstration of infantile refusal to accept reality, but was really real. Really real. Oh, so real.
And in their presentation on why the press should never again say they were lacking evidence, what emerged before their own tech team appeared to pull the plug was a claim that Democrats engaged in a vast conspiracy to “inject” hundreds of thousands of Biden votes by using voting machines built by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, with the help of wealthy Jew George Soros, that sent American votes overseas to servers in Germany where they could be altered according to orders from antifa. And then, when even that proved inadequate to defeat Trump, Democrats brought in “garbage cans” full of votes that were marked for Biden. Then counted them three times each. That may sound like an exaggeration. It’s not. It’s only a subset of the claims that were made during this peek into an alternative reality. Also Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye began pouring off his head at a rate that made it look as if his brain might be leaking from his skull. Which seemed entirely possible.
Giuliani took the stage first to begin the general theme of the day, which was to berate the press for saying that there was no evidence of voter fraud when he had a fistful of affidavits. Affidavits, people! For example, Giuliani claimed to have “60 witnesses” to an incident in which a truck pulled up in the wee hours of the morning “and people rushed to it thinking it had food” but instead it was “full of ballots, thousands of ballots” that were in garbage cans and paper bags. And then these votes were brought in “when they thought all the Republican observers had gone home” and run through the voting machines three times. This was not a single event, declared Giuliani, but a product of Joe Biden’s “election fraud team” that worked in “Democrat led cities” to plant the votes needed to put Biden ahead of Trump.
Giuliani then gave way to Sidney Powell, who demonstrated that when it comes to being disconnected from reality, this conference went to 12. Powell immediately veered away from trash can votes and right into how the election was really rigged by voting software written for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Chavez, rather unexpectedly, is apparently very anti-Trump. (That’s really unexpected since he died in 2013.) But Powell launched into an emotional explanation of how "Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro," and these companies are, of course, run by “the number two associate of George Soros.” As Powell went on, she also expressed how Cuba was involved, and how there was an “algorithm” that allowed this Venezuela-Jewish-Cuban cabal to define the values of votes. That algorithm that “probably flipped votes all over the country" because, according to Powell, “Donald Trump won in a landslide.”
Yes, she said that. This came right before the part where she explained that she also has an affidavit from someone who chatted about all this with Chavez (I am still not making this up) and that it was all approved by antifa. It was a Biden-Venezuelan-Jewish-Cuban-antifa conspiracy. And if you think she didn’t mention the Clinton Foundation in this … oh yes she did. All of these groups “had the election rigged for Mr. Biden,” said Powell. She went on to explain: “They can say a Biden vote counts 1.25 and a Trump vote counts 0.75, and that may be the numbers that were used here." All of this was explained to her by the Chavez chat man. Also, there is a server in Germany that is definitely connected. Though we don’t know how. So … just assume everyone not standing on the stage was a part of the conspiracy.
Powell then gave way to Jenna Ellis, who explained that, lord help everyone, all that had gone before was only the “opening statement” to the full trial they wanted to have. Ellis then explained that this would not be a trial of the public opinion before complaining that there wasn’t time to do it in court. But definitely, definitely, 99% of the press wasn’t worthy to even report on the story. Because they’re part of the conspiracy.
The whole thing finished off with some Q&A time in which Giuliani stepped forward to embrace everything that Powell had claimed about Chavez, Soros, antifa … the works. That included complaining about states being “stupid enough to send our votes out of the country ... to be counted by people who are allies of Chavez and Meduro ... run by an ally of George Soros." He knows this is a fact, said Giuliani. "When I first heard it, I didn't believe it, until Sydney showed me the documents ... you can Google it, well, unless they took it down." This was accompanied by more complaints about antifa’s role in fixing the election.
And you know all of this has to be true, because Giuliani gestured around the stage to proclaim, "There is nobody here who engages in fantasies.” This was followed by a claim that Trump won Michigan by 50,000 votes, and that the campaign was looking into challenges in both Virginia and New Mexico. By that point, Giuliani’s hair dye was largely on his shirt.
All this happened. And I didn’t even touch on the most ridiculous moments.
Yup, that really happened. Watch Rudy Giuliani reference a courtroom scene from the timely 1992 film "My Cousin Vinny." pic.twitter.com/tBis5HDf6k
If you thought there could not possibly be a more embarrassing and cringe-inducing press conference with Rudy Giuliani than the one at Four Seasons Landscaping, you were wrong. Very, very wrong.
Fox News aired Giuliani's presser in its entirety -- here's what their correspondent had to say about it afterwards Fisher: "Certainly a colorful news conference, but it was light on facts. So much of what he said was simply not true, or has already been thrown out in court." pic.twitter.com/YnPc0YzW4O
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Robert Harris
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
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ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
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NOAA via Getty Images
![[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/viral_quiz_identity_theft.png "[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'")
