onfocus

"The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product of several interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of local news; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficult to debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will help his political fortunes."

Saying that conspiracy believers are inoculated from new information is a terrifying way to put it. But yeah, it’s a cult.

The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.”

Unfit for command.

"The comments represent one of the most explicit acknowledgments to date that the White House’s aggressive push to bring students back to campus this fall has created serious risks for increased COVID transmission. It also underscores just how fragile the current situation is at college campuses across the country."

Seems like something they could have predicted. It’s almost like the push to open campuses was motivated by something other than public health concerns.

“While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” Biden said. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president. To represent all of us, not just our base or our party.”

Competency looks so unusual! But I think I'm ready for it again.

“Some stories demand collaboration, and this one is a plain example. The nation’s newsrooms — working together and, crucially, with the help of the public in communities around the nation — could find out and explain what is going on, at the macro and micro level,” he said.

Dan Gillmor on how the media should work to ensure the postal service story is told.

In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

Heartening to hear Facebook employees are continuing to speak up and challenge management. If you haven’t seen Max Wang’s departure video, it’s well worth your time: Leaving facebook: a critique of fb's policies, priorities, and ideologies, ft. hannah arendt. It’s a very personal take on the difficult ethical spot the company is putting its employees in.

"Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades’ worth of institutional postal knowledge."

Oh good, Democrats have requested an audit to get to the bottom of this. That should be swift and effective. *headdesk*

"Given these possibilities and Trump’s well-known opposition to voting by mail, logic might suggest that he would attempt to strengthen the USPS to alleviate those concerns. Instead, he’s weakening it and then using that weakness as a reason to argue against mail-in voting."

Congress needs to step in quickly here to make sure the right to vote is safe and available during a pandemic.

"’Unfortunately, not only has little to none of that funding been utilized, you are now proposing the very cuts that we sought to avoid with that emergency line of credit,’ Manchin said in his letter."

The new Postmaster is considering closing several post offices even though the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress included up to $10 billion in Treasury loans. I wonder if it's because the new Postmaster has a financial interest in seeing it fail? From the Washington Post: Trump ally takes over crisis-ridden Postal Service as top Senate Democrat demands inquiry on hiring:

"DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, the ambassador-nominee to Canada, have between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in assets in USPS competitors or contractors, according to Wos’s financial disclosure paperwork filed with the Office of Government Ethics."

It's just grifting all the way down. The USPS is going to be critical to democracy here in the near future.

"Federal tactical teams that have clashed with protesters in Portland in recent weeks will soon be leaving the city, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said Wednesday."

Relieved to hear this.

Update: Surprise! Now, not true. Article I linked has been updated to the headline: Federal Agents Agree to Withdraw From Portland, With Conditions. Those Conditions? Never! (Paraphrasing.)

"Fast forward five years and journalists and commentators are still talking about imminent pivots and praising him for always-temporary changes in his tone."

Tiring Trump trope.

"Critics say the government’s slow response to requests for transparency and the national media’s focus on the most salacious moments of the city’s demonstrations prove both federal officials and national reporters care more about property damage than the physical injuries protesters sustain on the streets."

What life in Portland is really like right now.