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On Feb. 10, Fox News was in lockstep with other cable news channels and major broadcast networks in presenting more than four hours of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

But at 5 p.m. Eastern, Fox News pulled away from the most graphic video evidence of violence during the insurrection by pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and switched to its popular daily roundtable show The Five.

Most of the panelists dismissed the Democratic impeachment managers presentation, defended the former president and moved on to other topics including the viral Zoom cat lawyer video despite the historic nature of the events in Washington. Viewers who wanted Fox News journalists take on the proceedings had to wait until anchor Bret Baier showed up at the top of the 6 p.m. hour.

The editorial judgment to cut away was met with derision on social media, where the conservative-leaning news network is often hammered by critics. On screen, Juan Williams, the lone liberal on The Five, angrily chastised his co-hosts for ignoring the evidence presented.

What played out that day demonstrates the pressure Fox News is under, as the network faces growing scrutiny over its role in supporting Trump and his disinformation claims that many believe helped to fuel the deadly insurrection attempt in the Capitol.

The profit engine of Rupert Murdochs Fox Corp. presents itself as a news network, but its often defined by its opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity, who pay fealty to Trump and the former presidents devoted followers.

Those followers now have multiple options to feed their fix for right-wing opinions some of them far more extreme than what is delivered on Fox News. Satisfying those viewers while also reporting information that does not fit their worldview has become a challenge for an organization that faces vocal detractors on the political center and left, a potentially expensive lawsuit from one of Trumps baseless voter fraud targets and an increasingly outsize role in the parent companys financial performance.

I have friends who dont watch Fox anymore because they see it as untethered from reality, said Richard Goodstein, a Washington attorney who has appeared on the channel as a liberal guest. The question for Fox is balancing losing viewers like that to losing viewers who switch channels rather than watching someone like me who forcefully brings facts and opinions that they cannot tolerate.

Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor for Fox News, said in an op-ed column for The Times that he faced anger from the Trump multitudes after defending the networks election night call of the once reliably red Arizona for Joe Biden.

When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed, he wrote.

Giving the benefit of the doubt and often full-throated support to a president whose lies led to an attempt to overturn an election in turn led to voting software maker Smartmatics $2.7-billion defamation lawsuit against the network and three of its hosts.

The suit filed Feb. 4 alleges that Fox News and its hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro damaged Smartmatics reputation and business by spreading Trumps conspiracy theories about the election being rigged to elect President Biden. (Fox News and the hosts have filed motions to dismiss the suit, saying the Trumps claims were newsworthy, even if they were false.)

A more immediate question hanging over Fox News is the same one the Republican party is grappling with: What is the next move for Trump? Just as Republican legislators fear Trump will support primary challengers back home if they take him to task, Fox News has to determine how to navigate his expected re-emergence following his acquittal in the second impeachment trial.

Joe Walsh, a former tea party movement congressman from Illinois and conservative radio host, said the right-wing audience remains enthralled with Trump.

Thats the only thing thats going to satiate the folks who turn on Fox, Walsh said. Right now they are going on about big tech censorship and immigration. Thats not going to be enough.

The challenges come as Fox News has emerged as the most significant piece of Fox Corp., which slimmed down after selling most of its entertainment assets to the Walt Disney Co. for $71 billion. During the current fiscal year, Fox News is expected to contribute 80% or more than $2 billion to Fox Corp.'s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, an industry-wide measurement of profitability.

Fox News has been the most-watched cable news channel for 19 consecutive years, thanks to its effective positioning as a right-leaning alternative to other TV news outlets. As the rest of the traditional TV business declined in 2020, the channels audience grew. Fox News became the most-watched network in all of cable TV, according to Nielsen.

The network expected an audience falloff once Trump lost the White House, as it had seen viewers tune out after Barack Obama, a Democrat, defeated his Republican opponents in 2008 and 2012.

But Trump remained the main story in the weeks after the 2020 election with his unfounded charges of voter fraud, leading to the insurrection at the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters that killed five people, followed by the second impeachment trial. Depressed Trump supporters tuned out of Fox News during coverage of those events, while the ratings for MSNBC and CNN surged as viewers who dont habitually watch cable news were tuning in.

Fox News has managed to ride out ratings fluctuations in the past, but it took longer this time. The network has ranked first in viewers since Bidens inauguration, although it still trails CNN in the 25 to 54 age group important to advertisers.

The dip was significant enough for Fox Corp. Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch to calm the waters. On Feb. 9, Murdoch told financial analysts that the company extended the employment contract of Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott and praised her performance.

Arnon Mishkin, director of the Fox News decision desk, explains his call of Arizona for former vice president Joe Biden.

Scott took over the operation in 2018 after it had been rocked by sexual harassment scandals and racial discrimination lawsuits related to the reign of the networks founding chief executive, Roger Ailes. After maintaining the networks ratings leadership for two years, she is now jiggering the networks lineup and will add at least two more hours of right-leaning opinion programs, which have always been the most reliable ratings performers.

Murdoch also tried to counter the notion that Fox News has veered too far to one end of the political spectrum.

We dont need to go further right, Murdoch said. Well stick where we are, and we think thats exactly right and thats the best thing for the business and for our viewers.

Despite the younger Murdochs assurances, there is a sense among some politicos and people inside Fox News that the network has already moved further right to stave off the insurgence of new outlets that are courting their audience. Even veterans of past Republican administrations, such as Matthew Dowd, who worked for George W. Bush, believe there has been a shift.

We saw them as conservative and more likely to be more friendly than others, but we never saw them as like, Oh, lets do Fox because theyre basically a propaganda arm, Dowd said. You always thought of it as a conservative outlet, but it was rational conservative.

A Fox News insider not authorized to speak publicly on the matter said the conservative bent of the network is reflective of where the Republican Party has gone under Trump.

This past year, Fox News saw the rise of a pesky new rival in Newsmax, which kept up a steadfast defense of Trumps voter fraud claims through President Bidens inauguration. Last fall, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based channel averaged as many as 1 million viewers at 7 p.m. Eastern on some days with host Greg Kelly, who on Trumps last day in office said, I miss him already.

Newsmaxs ratings have faded in recent weeks. Since the inauguration it has averaged 226,000 viewers compared with 2.5 million for Fox News.

The other right-wing Fox wannabe is the more strident San Diego-based One America News Network, which does not have enough distribution in cable and satellite homes to be measured by Nielsen.

But the new breed of conservative outlets know how to attract attention. After Fox News Media canceled Dobbs Fox Business Network program where many of Trumps election fraud falsehoods were promoted OAN founder Robert Herring asked in a tweet for the host to give him a call. We may have a position available for you in which you wouldnt be censored for speaking the truth! Herring wrote.

Dobbs remains under contract to Fox News and still gets an annual salary in the seven figures.

Neither of the upstart channels has the financial resources or infrastructure to knock Fox News off its perch. Nevertheless, Fox News is entering an era where a multitude of new contenders will try to nibble away at the conservative audience it once had to itself.

Theyve gone from having zero wing-nut competition to aggressive wing-nut competition, said Mike Murphy, a former Republican consultant and current political analyst for NBC News.

In addition to watching on cable, viewers can stream Newsmax and OAN without a pay TV subscription. There are also more digital conservative channels such as the First, which carries a nightly show from former Fox News host Bill OReilly, and Glenn Becks Blaze Live. Both are available on free ad-supported streaming services such as Pluto.

Social media has provided new outlets for right-leaning voices as well. The Facebook page of Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, a former cop and Secret Service agent turned pugnacious Trump-defending pundit, has more monthly engagements than any major mainstream news organization on the platform.

Jon Klein, a digital media entrepreneur and former CNN president, said audience fragmentation is inevitable now that streaming has reached critical mass.

Ten years ago conservative audiences were not that digitally savvy, Klein said. The early adopters of digital media were younger, more liberal, educated, et cetera. None of this digital technology is a mystery anymore to the older white males who watch Fox News and certainly not a mystery to the alt-right young men they want.

Fox News does have an internal image problem resulting from the Arizona election call, which it stood by, despite an angry response from the Trump campaign and his supporters.

Stirewalt was fired from Fox News in a company restructuring on Jan. 19. Bill Sammon, the longtime executive in charge of the Washington bureau, which has long fought to remain independent from the networks opinion side, announced his retirement a day earlier.

Both moves were seen as responses to their roles on election night, leaving some of the journalists at the company stunned and concerned that the network is lessening its commitment to straight news.

Rupert Murdoch recently told the Washington Post that Stirewalts exit was not related to the Arizona call. It was known among Fox News executives that Murdoch was not a fan of Stirewalt, who declined comment.

Even the perception that Fox News ousted journalists over reporting an election result that was ultimately accurate could damage one of the foundational constructs of the channel. The integrity of the Fox News polling unit and the precision accuracy of its election decision desk has helped define the divide between news and opinion.

But keeping the core conservative Fox News viewer happy is the companys primary goal. Rupert Murdochs U.S. newspapers the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have been highly critical of Trumps actions on their editorial pages since he lost the election. Any personal political convictions he has on the matter are not worth alienating fickle TV viewers who could ultimately have an impact on the companys balance sheet.

They are not sentimental about their programming decisions, Klein said of the Murdochs. They do what they need to do to get an audience.

Here is the original post:
Fox News tries to satisfy Trump fans, but at what cost? - Los Angeles Times

Over the past month, the world has watched the United States in the throes of a struggle over a democratic system that they thought was invincible. Then more recently, in Myanmar we saw the borrowed false accusations of a corrupted election succeed in overthrowing a democracy, at least temporarily.

It's felt for many of us as if the foundations of democratic processes are on trial, and democracys source in the ancient world has been looked to for answers. But the widely accepted story that democracy was a brilliant, even miraculous, invention of 5th-century BCE Athens, and that the West is the heir to that moment in time, has obscured the universal hard work that's required to make democracy work well.

My research, among others', suggests that the struggle to create social and political systems that serve the wider populace existed long before, and in regions far distant, from classical Athens.

From armed mobs descending on the US Capitol, to the cleansing installation of a new American president, the world peered with a mixture of horror and bemusement as the self-professed greatest democracy in the world played out its internal battles. Democrats'Twitter was awash with teary American exceptionalism citing the victory and drawbacks of the worlds greatest deliberative body.

People around the world wanted to rejoice, but felt themselves balking at the only-in-America stance of the rhetoric.

At the same time, another more bizarre thread ran through all of this: The mobs descending on the Capitol wore the insignia of a variety of Greek and Roman fictionalised histories, and on the other side a Democratic senator condemned the chaos by citing Roman history, only minutes after regaining the Senate floor from the mob attack.

This equivalence between American democracy and the ancient world has a very long and problematic history the so-called founders evoked the Roman republic in defence of both their representative democracy and their adherence to slavery. By and large, the academic world has been willing to concede the parallels if Athens and Rome were the progenitors of democracy, the US was their most prominent heir.

The discipline of classics the study of ancient Greece and Rome has been undergoing some serious soul-searching in the past few years, just as classical history was increasingly picked up and distorted by the alt-right. The events of the past few months have brought this scholarly argument into the public forum, with the increasingly heated debate coming to a head in the past week.

Scholars have pointed out the huge fault lines in Athenian democracy (most of the population of Athens could not participate), and the largely manipulated history of the early Roman republic.

Many (but not all) classicists have balked at the myth of a legacy of an exclusive Western civilisation, but the origins of democracy have remained fairly stubbornly rooted in classical soil. That ultimate arbiter of history and culture, Wikipedia, tells us that the concepts of democracy originated in ancient Athens circa 508 BC. There's been surprisingly little push-back in classics to challenge that idea.

American exceptionalism has been uncannily mirrored by ancient Athenian exceptionalism.

A large part of this is definitional the Greek historian Herodotus first calls the political system of the 5th century BCE a democracy, and anything that doesnt fit that exact pattern is dismissed. (In fact, Herodotus puts the earliest use of the term democracy not in the mouths of Athenians, but in a speech debating the merits of different political systems by that notorious Persian, Darius I but thats another story).

Pedants will tell you that the US is a republic (after Rome) and not a democracy (following Athens), but that's a rhetorical ploy.When we say democracy, we mean a political system where decisions are made by the majority of its populace, or their elected representatives, in some kind of formalised way.

And that the practice of democracy plays out in a variety of ways across the world. Dont tell the protestors in the Republic of Myanmar that their stolen parliamentary system was not a democracy because it doesnt fit the Athenian model; they know better.

In large part, the legacy of Athens and Rome is the result of documentation. They're the models because they recorded what they did (or at least others wrote about them later). But if we look harder at the traces of world history, other examples emerge that indicate that the practice of democracy has wider roots and more diverse branches.

If the debate around the validity of the classical tradition goes anywhere, it will be to acknowledge that democracy wasnt the brilliant invention of an elite group of men in Iron-Age Greece.

My research on the Medes of the Zagros Mountains in Iran suggests that a few hundred years before Athens, Median communities responded to the encroaching Assyrian Empire by formalising their consensus decision-making; we dont have written confirmation for this transition, because the Medes probably purposefully avoided the record-keeping that would have made it easier for the Assyrians to extort taxes and tribute from them.

But archaeological excavations revealed a new Median form of columned meeting house that seems designed specifically for communal gatherings not unlike the famous Athenian hillslope meeting ground. My research team is now undertaking further analyses of the pottery and animal bones from these sites to find out just how far people were willing to travel to participate in these deliberations.

Early states in Africa also seem to have shared many components with the democratic tribal system of 5th-century BCE Athens, although, again, oral histories silenced by colonialism make it difficult to confirm details.

Larissa Behrendt has argued that Indigenous Australian communities used a variety of institutionalised democratic principles in their governance before colonialism imposed its own structure on them.

Jettisoning the exceptionalism of Athenian democracy isnt about rejecting that heritage. Athenian democracy, deeply flawed as it was, nonetheless provided a model for the benefits of a political system where decision-making was widely (but not widely enough) distributed. The fact that Athenians and later Romans wrote so convincingly of their reservations about this system may have been the best thing about it.

But if the debate regarding the validity of the classical tradition goes anywhere, it will be to acknowledge that democracy wasnt the brilliant invention of an elite group of men in Iron-Age Greece.

Democracy is an answer to an ancient question:How can communities serve all their members? Answering this question is an essential part of the functioning of human societies, and democracy is one solution that has both flourished and been quashed across history and around the world.

Greece and Rome are notable, but not exclusive, examples of the merits and failures of these systems. The false origin story of a democracy born in Athens with the West as its heir creates a barrier between democratic ideals and the establishment of enduring systems of governance around the world.

Its time to look more carefully for the democratic impulse in all our communities.

Read more from the original source:
The global roots of democracy matter if it is to flourish in the future Monash Lens - Monash Lens

Despite Donald Trumps seeming lack of interest in the project, a number of his followers around the US have been flirting with the idea of forming a breakaway party of the right to challenge the Republican establishment. Most of these have names which use the word patriot.

In Florida, former Republican voters registered the American Patriot Party of the United States or TAPPUS, for short while at the end of January a spokesman for the former president denied reports he was planning to fundraise in cooperation with a group calling itself the MAGA Patriot Party National Committee.

Patriot was a word that surfaced repeatedly during the assault on the US Capitol in January, being repeatedly invoked to define the identities and motivations of those who invaded the nations legislative heart. Ivanka Trump herself praised the participants on Twitter as American Patriots though she deleted her tweet after being challenged by other Twitter users for her use of this word.

Patriot is a common enough word, but its modern use is often nebulous. A simple dictionary definition of a patriot is one who loves and supports his or her country. So you could call anyone who expressed their love for their country a patriot no matter where or when they lived. In the US context, though, until relatively recently the word has been used most frequently in relation to New England and especially Boston in the era of the American revolution.

Patriot has long been a convenient shorthand for those American colonists who supported or participated in the revolution, as distinct from the loyalists who hoped that the North American colonies would remain part of the British empire. New Englanders, particularly those who live in or around Boston, like to think that their city and region holds a special place in the history of the revolution, and thus of the United States. It was the home of leaders such as Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. It was also the site of the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The regions sole National Football League franchise is the New England Patriots, who are based in Bostons southern suburbs. The teams mascot, Pat Patriot, is depicted as a revolutionary-era soldier, wearing a Continental Army uniform and a tricorne hat. On the third Monday of April, Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut celebrate the state holiday known as Patriots Day, in commemoration of the opening battles of the American revolution, which took place at Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy (now Arlington), Massachusetts.

The holiday is marked by re-enactments of these battles, and, more prominently, by the Boston Marathon. The 2016 film Patriots Day was so titled because its subject was the 2013 terrorist attack on the marathon.

What, then, is the connection between a regional tradition of remembrance of the revolution and the crowds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol Building? In 2016 a small but assertive group which called itself Patriot Prayer emerged, holding pro-Trump rallies in liberal west coast enclaves such as Portland, Oregon. But the term did not gain wide usage among white nationalists and other members of the alt-right until 2020, when it became a popular way for Trump supporters to describe themselves.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager who shot three people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was hailed by Trump supporters as a patriot. Since Novembers presidential election, the word has been employed repeatedly among those who believe that the Democrats stole Trumps victory.

Trump supporters travelling from Louisville, Kentucky for the rally on January 6 referred to their group as a patriot caravan. Meanwhile the husband of Ashli Babbit the air force veteran who was shot and killed by Capitol police during the invasion praised her as a great patriot to all who knew her.

On the far-right Breitbart website, someone commenting on a story quoting Donald Trump calling for a peaceful transfer of power attracted a large number of approvals when they left the following comment:

There will NEVER be reconciliation. We have irreconcilable differences, and the fight has just begun. We need to disown the RNC until they support the Patriot Party.

The word patriot has an obvious appeal. Its difficult to argue against a person or groups love of their country and their willingness to take action to defend it. Thats particularly significant when, in the case of the alt-right, it believes that its nations core values are threatened.

But we might view white nationalists embrace of the term as inspired less by American history than by the 2000 Hollywood film The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson himself one of Hollywoods most ardent conservatives. Gibsons character enters the War of Independence only reluctantly to protect one son and avenge the death of another. In other words, for unimpeachable motives.

But is it a stretch to apply this conception of the patriot to those who, like Babbit or the QAnon Shaman, stormed the Capitol because they believed that the Democrats had stolen the election? From the point of view of someone who believes the QAnon conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party elite were behind a vast paedophile ring threatening innocent children, perhaps this really did seem to be an act of patriotism.

Samuel Johnson famously claimed that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but as is so often true the reality is undoubtedly far more complex.

Read more:
'Patriots' in America: how fighting for your country has taken on new meaning for Trump supporters - The Conversation UK

Patricia Lockwood created a Twitter account in 2011. Right away, she knew what to do with it. Free in the knowledge that no one was listening, I mostly used it to tweet absurdities like Touch it, Mr. Quiddity moaned. Touch Mr. Quidditys thing, she writes, in her memoir Priestdaddy (2017). Back in those days, people tended either to dismiss Twitter as one of the stupider things to have happened in human historythe whole world should care what you had for lunch?or to celebrate it as a revolution that would usher in a golden age of democracy and peace. Tuna-fish sandwiches versus the Arab Spring: that was the crux of the debate. Fewer saw that the form could be a kind of fiction, an exercise in pure persona sprung from the manacles of story, or even sense. All you needed was style, and Lockwood had it. (It helped that she was a poet, a fondler and compressor of language.) Her best tweets were tonally filthy but textually clean, like a clothed flasher, their voice so intrinsic to the new medium, so obviously online, that if you tried to explain to a parent or an offline friend what you were laughing at you ended up sounding like a fool. Tweeting is an art form, Lockwood tells her skeptical mother, in Priestdaddy. Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit. She made it seem like it was.

A decade has passed since those happy days. Twitter did not usher in a definitive dawn of democracy abroad. Democracy in America has barely survived it. Meanwhile, much of the mediums fun has gone sour and sharp. Twitter is still a comedy club and a speakers corner, the cozy back booth at an all-night diner. Its also a stoning square, a rave on bad acid, an eternal Wednesday in a high-school cafeteria, an upside-down Tower of Babel pointing straight to human hell. What began as one of the biggest literary experiments since the birth of the world, everyone invited to shoot out words from their fingers at any time, has calcified into a genre clogged with clichs, one of which Lockwood has taken as the title of her first novel, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead). To translate for the offline: this is what someone says in a clutch of outrage upon discovering a topic or bit of newsone which, it is safe to assume, many people are already talking about.

Why are we still On Here? Twitter users often ask with the desperation of the damned, and the answer that Lockwoods book immediately gives is that we are addicts. What opium did to the minds of the nineteenth century is no different than what the Internetthe portal, as Lockwood calls itis doing to the minds of the twenty-first. We know this from science, some of us from experience, but Lockwood is out to describe that sensation of dependency, the feeling of possessing a screen-suckled brainor of being possessed by it. Thomas De Quincey, plugged full of poppy, reported sitting at a window from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move, and something similar happens to Lockwoods unnamed protagonist when she sits in front of her computer screen:

Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeatingthe words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath, and laya hand on the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. Are youlocked in? he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing thatalways broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brownpictures of roast chickensmaybe because thats what women used to dowith their days.

A digital ailment demands a digital cure: this is funny, sad, and right, as is the telling grammatical slip at the end of the paragraph, which implies that women used to Google chickens rather than cook them. Lockwood is sending a bulletin from the future, when, horrifyingly, such things will be said of her generation, and be true.

That historical anxiety, directed both at the past and the future, is acutely felt by Lockwoods protagonist, who, like Lockwood herself, is a married woman in her late thirties who has found real-world eminence by being very online. She is a kind of diplomat from the digital world, paid to travel around the globe to give lectures and appear on panels, at which she tries to explain things like why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. Her public is not always receptive to such meditations. At an appearance in Bristol, an audience member brandishes a printout of the post that shot her to fameCan a dog be twins?and tears it in two. This is your contribution to society? he asks, stomping out.

Here is a reply guy in the flesh, a sneering man who reminds the protagonist that she is silly, unserious, a womana fact that Lockwoods protagonist, in spite of professing no particular attachment to what the portal has taught her to call her pronoun, knows all too well. Digital optimists like to say that social media is just a supercharged update of Enlightenment caf culture, with tweets passed around instead of pamphlets. But Lockwoods protagonist knows that she is excluded from that vision of the past. While the men, class permitting, read and debated, she would have been doing the washing and birthing the children; as recently as the fifties, a friend reminds her, the two of them would likely have been housewives. So what does it mean that she, a woman in the historically anomalous position of determining the course of her own life (notably, she is childless), is choosing to spend her days and nights glued to the portal, looking at a tarantulas compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Goghs The Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a mans erection? What is her contribution to society?

The novel itself is one answer. Stream-of consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him, the protagonist tells the audience at one of her events. But what about the stream-of-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you? The comparison to Joyce, the man who wanted his wife to fart all over him, is bold, and telling. Lockwood has set out to portray not merely a mind through language, as Joyce did, but what she calls the mind, the molting collective consciousness that has melded with her protagonists singular one. And, as Joyce did, she sets about doing it through form. No One Is Talking About This is structured as a kind of riff on the tweet scroll, discrete paragraphs (many two hundred and eighty characters or less) arranged one after another to simulate, on the fixed page, the rhythm of a digital feed. This methoddense bulletins of text framed by clean white spaceis not revolutionary, or even innovative. It was used in the seventies to great effect by novelists like Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, and it has become newly popular over the past decade as a way to mimic a fragmented, flitting modern consciousnessoften that of a woman who is harried by competing demands on her attention. It is a permissive form, tempting to use and easy to abuse, since, paradoxically, the arrangement of disconnected beats implies a unity of meaning that the text itself may not do enough to earn.

The critic Lauren Oyler, a skeptic of the fragmented method, parodies it in a long section of her own novel, Fake Accounts, another recent dbut about life lived in the shadow of the Internet. Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? Oylers narrator asks. If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldnt write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter. The question of how to represent the digital world in language has become only more interesting, and more urgent, as it has become clearer that the Internet is not just a device but an atmosphere, a state of being. Were always online, even when were off, our profiles standing sentry for us at all hours, our minds helplessly tuned to the ironic, mocking register of well-defended Internet speak. That is exactly the voice of Oylers narrator, who, like Lockwoods protagonist, is a young white millennial woman who resembles her author in sundry particulars, as a digital avatar might. Oylers narrator is entertainingly critical of digital life even as she is formed by it; it is her milieu, and the novel confronts its artifice, in part, by confessing its own. Sections of the book are labelled with the equivalent of highway signage (MIDDLE (Something Happens)); its title, which is seemingly descriptivethe novels nominal plot is launched by the narrators discovery that her boyfriend has an alt-right persona on Instagramdoubles, usefully, as a definition of fiction itself. When she is feeling cheeky, the narrator addresses her presumed readers, a silent gaggle of ex-boyfriends: the same audience that she might imagine checking out her social media accounts, keeping tabs.

Lockwood is up to something more sincere. She embraces the fragment because she has set herself the challenge of depiction; the medium becomes the message, the very point. Thoughts about fatbergs, videos of police brutality (the protagonist is trying to hate the policenot easy, given that her father is a retired cop), baby Hitler, the word normalize, and on and on and on, all of it sluiced together and left to lodge in the hive mind: that is what Lockwood wants to show us, and wants to see more clearly for herself. Someone could write it, Lockwoods protagonist tells a fellow panellist, a man who has earned fame by posting increasing amounts of his balls online. It would have to be done, she thinks, as a social novel, a documentation of the mores and habits of the portal collective. Already when people are writing about it, theyre getting it all wrong, she says. But Lockwood gets it right, mimicking the medium while shrewdly parodying its ethos:

P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics! She hooted into a hot microphone at apublic library. She had been lightly criticized for her incompleteunderstanding of the Spanish Civil War that week, and the memory of itstill smarted. P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics will manifest on earth asa racoon with a scab for a face!

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing.

More here:
Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, and the Voices That Get Lost Online - The New Yorker

Wrapping yourself in an American flag does not make you a patriot any more than going to church makes you a Christian.

The people who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 were not patriots, despite their chants of USA! USA!, weaponized American flags, and the blessings of a man who would be their king.

The true patriots at the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, were the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metro Police. They defended the members of Congress against the murderous mob who, unchecked, might have lynched (they had a gallows) sitting members of the U.S. government, including the vice president.

The flag-waving mob consisted of revolutionaries, insurrectionists, seditionists, rebels, thugs, racists, extremists, criminals, sovereign citizens, rogue cops, war-trained veterans, domestic terrorists, conspirators. Not a patriot among them.

To be fair, many of the people in the riot just got caught up in the moment, mob mentality, mass hysteria. They probably thought they were in the right because they truly believed Donald Trump won the election.

After all, since last summer Trump had been telling his supporters the only way he could lose the election was if it were rigged. And when he actually did lose the election, he refused to accept the results and whipped his supporters into a seditious frenzy by claiming without any evidence whatsoever that the election was stolen from him.

Aided and abetted by journalistically bankrupt right-wing media and self-serving politicians, Trump still sustains The Big Lie that he won despite overwhelming evidence that he lost.

The Big Lie is a tactic chillingly articulated by one of the architects of the Holocaust, Josef Goebbels, who said: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

I used to believe it could never happen here. I was wrong. It is happening here.

By grandiosely and mendaciously repeating the Big Lie that he won the election, Trump and his media sycophants have fooled and made fools of millions of credulous Americans.

Two hundred-and-still-counting rioters are facing federal charges ranging from misdemeanors to felonies to sedition. Fooled by Trump and the alt-right media. Foolish for taking selfies.

REALITY CHECK

Not only does Trump continue to promulgate the Big Lie, he has mesmerized millions of Americans into thinking theyre patriots. And these zombie patriots have appropriated the American flag as if only they were entitled to it.

Theres nothing patriotic about overthrowing our government.

And it is oxymoronic to use the American flag in support of insurrection.

All together now: I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands .

Theres a whole lot of cognitive dissonance going on here, some very pretzeled logic, alternate reality.

It is a fundamental law of the universe: The more you ignore reality, the more it will work against you. Just ask the folks in jail.

I like to think some Trump supporters were shocked back into the real world, ashamed of what happened Jan. 6 and beginning to realize what Trump and his echo chamber have played them.

U.S. democracy marched forward and certified the election of Biden and Harris despite the riot and Trumps histrionics.

They saw Trump impeached, again. This time for the high crime of inciting insurrection. They witnessed a lopsided trial where the House impeachment managers proved beyond doubt Trump was guilty, guilty, guilty.

Depressingly but not surprisingly, 43 Republican senators ignored the evidence Feb. 13 and voted to acquit. Perhaps they just want to ride Trumps insurrectionary gravy train to its dead end. Or maybe those faithless pols are afraid of their Trump-loving and some clearly violent constituents?

What was encouraging and surprising Feb. 13 was that seven Republican senators Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Toomey broke ranks and voted to convict Trump. They risked political suicide by rejecting partisan politics and upholding their oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

As Sen. Mitch McConnell so eloquently and hypocritically put it after he voted to acquit on an inane technicality, there was no question Trump was practically and morally responsible for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection riot.

Real patriots vote their conscience. Real Republicans accept the results of elections. They suck it up if they dont like who got elected, just as the Democrats did in 2000, 2004 and 2016.

Real patriots dont betray their oath of office and vote even after the riot not to certify the free and fair election of Biden and Harris.

Eighteenth-century British pundit Samuel Johnson noted, Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Former President Donald Trump is a lying, power-hungry scoundrel, and the people who blindly follow him are not patriots.

By their actions and rejection of reality, they have forfeited their right to call themselves patriots or to display the flag of the country they betrayed.

The election wasnt stolen, but the U.S. flag was.

Its our flag, and we want it back.

Tom Durkin is a freelance writer and photographer in Nevada City.

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Tom Durkin: Stop the steal of our flag - The Union of Grass Valley