No better time to post Hunter S. Thompson on 9/12/2001.
Ignoring Trump threats, Europe hits Google with 2.95B euro fine for adtech monopoly Ars Technica
Why more and more people are tuning the news out
Guardian: “News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out. The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.
“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who says she stopped watching the news about eight years ago. “There were times that I’d be up at two or three o’clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn’t have a lot of control over.” She’s not alone.
Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded. The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%.
Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information…”
DC sues Trump over National Guard deployment
Politico – “D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued the Trump administration on Thursday for deploying the National Guard to Washington, saying it infringes on the city’s sovereignty and violates laws prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. “The deployment of National Guard troops to police District streets without the District’s consent infringes on its sovereignty and right to self-governance,” lawyers for D.C. wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed in federal District Court in Washington.
“The deployment also risks inflaming tensions and fueling distrust toward local law enforcement. And it inflicts economic injuries, depressing business activities and tourism that form the backbone of the local economy and tax base. No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation.” The lawsuit is the latest legal pushback against President Donald Trump’s effort to send troops into cities to facilitate his policy goals — from mass deportation to cracking down on violent crime in areas run by Democrats.
Over 2,200 National Guard troops from seven states and the District of Columbia are currently patrolling the streets of the District dressed in military fatigues, carrying rifles, and driving armored vehicles. The U.S. Department of Defense has directed these troops to conduct core law enforcement activities, including “presence patrols” and “community patrols.” The U.S. Department of Justice has also deputized these troops to engage in additional law enforcement activities, including searches, seizures, and arrests. And despite the fact that these troops are in state militia status—and thus are legally required to be under the sole command of their governors—the President has placed them under the control of the nation’s military leadership, which exercises day-to-day supervision over the law enforcement operations they have been designated to conduct.
The residents and leaders of the District of Columbia have not requested any of this. But the President has determined that the District, which he has called a “filthy and crime ridden embarrassment,” should be “federalize[d],” so that his Administration can “run it the way it’s supposed to be run.” He has therefore disregarded Congress’s decision, half a century ago, to afford the residents of the District “the powers of local self-government,” including the authority to police the District as they see fit. In so doing, he has run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement…”
The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler
The Atlantic gift article – A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II. “The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago.
“I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.
Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.
Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup foundthat 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims. The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggestedin 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”…
Tucker Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip…
Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.
