The incomparable Rick Perlstein describes "The Unmaking of the Presidential Debate 2016." No, it's not about the debates we've had this year, but mainly about why we didn't have any until 1960 and why we didn't have any more until 1976, the debate during which Gerald Ford said, "(t)here is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," which just about everyone who watched it understood, in context, until the media all pretended they were six years old. After that, of course, came the sound bite -- but before that came the legions of communications researchers tasked with getting Jimmy Carter to smile more.
The Republican Presidential nominee has been getting a lot of attention over the weekend, of course, but what of the man who might actually run America? Erin Schumaker at Huffington Post tells us the story of how Gov. Mike Pence essentially created an HIV epidemic in Scott County, Indiana during 2015. It started, of course, with the county's only Planned Parenthood clinic leaving, since that Planned Parenthood clinic was the only one in the county doing HIV tests, and then progressed through Mr. Pence's "moral" opposition to needle exchanges (hey, dumbass: drug addicts can't just say no to drugs! That's why they're addicts!), which he finally rescinded, but too late for the nearly 200 good Indianans who've now got an incurable disease that's expensive to treat. Why, it's almost like being a right-wing leader means creating more crises for you to "lead" people through.
Shane Burley and Alexander Reid Cross describe "How the Alt Right is Trying to Create a ‘Safe Space’ for Racism on College Campuses." And no, "safe space" isn't the authors' term -- it's the term preferred by certain white supremacists. And they think liberals always sound like a bunch of politically-correct weaklings? And that's before you get to weaselly talking points like "race realism" (their "realism" claims whites are smarter than blacks; think they're doing craniometry experiments?). Seriously, though, this is a good report, not just on the white supremacists trying to influence Our Impressionable Youth, but also on the anti-fascist organizations sprouting up in response.
Writer Sarah Nyberg creates Arguetron, a Twitterbot that baits right-wing bigots and gets some of the them to fight for hours on end. I stand in awe of her achievement, not just because I'm lucky to know a handful of HTML tags, but also because getting these morons to argue with nobody, it turns out, is really not that hard! (Creepily, getting them to hit on nobody also isn't that hard.) Seriously, though, right-wing arguments aren't that original -- which means that when some white supremacist (ooh, sorry, alt-right, mustn't hurt racist fee-fees) makes his own Twitter bot, it won't be as good as Ms. Nyberg's.
Finally, Melissa Hellmann profiles the D.C. Black Workers' Center. Like other members of the National Black Workers Center Project, the D.C. Center provides job training skills and helps connect workers with employers, of course, but it also helps black workers form co-ops, so that workers can have more control over their lives. If we're lucky, right-wingers will one day focus all their ZOMG COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!! fire on these Workers' Centers -- I say "lucky," of course, only because that means those Workers' Centers will be very successful.
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