Opinion | The Lawbreakers Trump Loves – By Nicholas Kristof – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• Aug. 29, 2020
• • 1099

Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times

“Even as President Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on the White House lawn, lawbreakers rampaged through the capital.

Would our law-and-order president leap off the podium and tackle them? He once said he would race unarmed into a building to tackle a school shooter. But sadly he ignored these blatant lawbreakers, presidential aides violating Hatch Act restrictions on political manipulation of government.

It’s one law he doesn’t want to uphold. Asked about the Hatch Act, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, scoffed, “Nobody outside of the beltway really cares.”

Inside the beltway, Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention conjure grave national threats from raging anarchists.

“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, and agitators, and criminals,” Trump warned in his acceptance speech.

The Republican convention included video glimpses of “Biden’s America,” with a scary scene of fire raging in the streets. But those streets turned out to be in Barcelona, Spain; it wasn’t “Biden’s America” or even America at all, just another in a stream of lies. (By the count of The Washington Post, Trump has uttered more than 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office.)

Of course, even if it had been filmed in America this year, it wouldn’t have been Biden’s America, but Trump’s America. The real Biden’s America, the period when he was vice president, was a time of comparative calm, growing prosperity and improving health care.”

“. . . . “Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.” ”

“. . . . Even as Trump exaggerates threats from “anarchists,” there are plenty of legitimate threats to the public that he ignores. Climate change raises the risk of forest fires, drought, intense hurricanes and flooding. And the coronavirus is claiming American lives at the rate of more than one every 90 seconds — yet Trump simply pretends to have defeated the virus, defying the need for masks and social distancing.”

David Lindsay: One of the big improvements this summer, is that Nicolas Kristof woke up to the threat of climate change, and became in the last month, for the first time, a climate hawk. He is such a powerful writer.

Opinion | America’s Coronavirus Reopening Choice: Schools, Bars or Disney World? – By Aaron E. Carroll – The New York Times

By Aaron E. Carroll

Contributing Opinion Writer

• Aug. 28, 2020

Video

CreditCredit…By Igor Bastidas

“My daughter argues that as long as she’s seeing all of her friends together in school, they should be able to gather together in their houses as well. Unfortunately, she has risk exactly backward. She’s not alone; lots of Americans do.

My kids, like most in Indiana, have been back at school since mid-August. Each time my 9th and 11th grader head off to high school, they spend more time among other human beings in a day than they had cumulatively all summer. Because of that, they along with many of their friends and those friends’ parents think that there’s less reason to be careful in other aspects of their lives.

But as we loosen restrictions in some areas, we should be increasing restrictions in others. If kids are going to take on more risk at school, they should find ways to be even safer outside of it. Large groupings at a friend’s house are not a good idea.

Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.”

Opinion | Welcome to the R.N.C.’s Alternate Universe – By Charlie Warzel – The New York Times

By Charlie Warzel

Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large.

• Aug. 27, 2020

In his R.N.C. speech on Tuesday night, U.S. Rep Matt Gaetz warned viewers that radical Democrats would try to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.”Credit…Republican National Convention/Via Reuters

“One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned covering the daily information wars of the Trump era is that a meaningful percentage of Americans live in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information.

Some are armed with their own completely fabricated facts about the world while others, as the journalist Joshua Green wrote in this section in 2017, rearrange our shared facts “to compose an entirely different narrative.” There is little consensus on the top story of the day or the major threats facing the country. You will have noticed this if you’ve ever watched a congressional hearing and flipped between CNN or MSNBC and Fox News. The video feed is the same but the interpretation of events is radically different.

Personally, I’ve never seen a clearer demonstration of the Two Universes phenomenon than this week’s Republican National Convention.

For three nights, in a shameless display of loyalty to President Trump, the party has conjured up what my colleague Frank Bruni described as an “upside-down vision” of the world. Theirs is a universe in which the coronavirus pandemic is largely in the rear view (on Aug. 25, 1,136 Americans died from the virus) and where, according to Representative Matt Gaetz, radical Democrats threaten to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” A universe where the existential dangers of climate change pale in comparison to those of cancel culture — even as the West is ravaged by blackouts and wildfires and the Gulf Coast is slammed by a devastating hurricane.

This week, my colleague Jamelle Bouie described some of what we’re seeing as the “Fox Newsification of the Republicans” by “a president who rose to political power via the cable news channel and who exists in a codependent relationship with the network.”

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The comparison is apt, as Fox News has been extremely successful in crafting and selling an alternate reality to its viewers each night for well over a decade. The trick is to evoke two dueling emotions — fear and devotion — one conspiracy theory at a time. Fox News has mastered this and so has the R.N.C.”

David Lindsay:  Yes, all too true. But there might be some solutions to this mess out there. President Ronald Reagan somehow cancelled a rule or law of the FCC that said in order to broadcast news, you had to allow equal time to the main opposing position of any postion you took or reported on. Before then, all news shows were more or less balanced. After this rule was abolished, right wing news channels like Fox went all out for spin and opinion and even lies, in the name of journalistic truth.We should bring back the fairness in reporting doctrine.

Opinion | ‘I Fear That We Are Witnessing the End of American Democracy’ – by Thomas Edsall – The New York Times

I would love to be more relevant. I found this piece by Tom Edsall so edifying, that I thought about posting it, and calling my blog, “Please, make me smarter!” This is the first clear explanation I’ve read for the extraordinary loyalty of most Trump supporters.

“. . .  According to Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them,” Trump is expert at sending “signals that are music to the ears of his base,” signals that ineradicably affirm his membership in the populist right wing of the Republican Party.

Greene argued in an email that when

Trump says that a judge of Mexican ancestry can’t do his job, or attacks women for their physical appearance, or makes fun of a disabled reporter, or says that there are good people on both sides of a violent neo-Nazi rally, or that Haiti is a “shithole.” or that the “Second Amendment People” can maybe do something about Hillary Clinton, Trump is very deliberately and publicly excommunicating himself from the company of liberals, even moderate ones.

In Greene’s view, Trump offers a case study in the deployment of “costly signals.”

How does it work? Greene writes:

Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.

At the same time, Trump’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, described the signaling phenomenon in a 2017 Edge talk as an outgrowth of what he calls a “coalitional instinct.”

“To earn membership in a group,” Tooby says, “you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups.”

This, Tooby notes, encourages extremism: “Practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty.” Far more effective are “unusual, exaggerated beliefs,” including “alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons.”

The success of Trump’s strategy will have long term consequences for the Republican Party, in Greene’s view:

Trump won over the base by publicly sacrificing his broader respectability. Back in 2016, the other Republican primary candidates looked ahead at the general election and thought this was a losing strategy. But Trump pulled it off, perhaps because he didn’t really care about winning. But now he owns the party. No Republican can get elected without the Republican base, and the Republican base trusts Trump and only Trump, thanks to his costly signals.”

Heat, Smoke and Covid Are Battering the Workers Who Feed America – By Somini Sengupta – The New York Times

By Somini Sengupta

Photographs by Brian L. Frank

• Aug. 25, 2020

“STOCKTON, Calif — Work began in the dark. At 4 a.m., Briseida Flores could make out a fire burning in the distance. Floodlights illuminated the fields. And shoulder to shoulder with dozens of others, Ms. Flores pushed into the rows of corn. Swiftly, they plucked. One after the other. First under the lights, then by the first rays of daylight.

By 10:30 a.m., it was unbearably hot. Hundreds of wildfires were burning to the north, and so much smoke was settling into the San Joaquin Valley that the local air pollution agency issued a health alert. Ms. Flores, 19, who had joined her mother in the fields after her father lost his job in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, found it hard to breathe in between the tightly planted rows. Her jeans were soaked with sweat.

“It felt like a hundred degrees in there,” Ms. Flores said. “We said we don’t want to go in anymore.”

She went home, exhausted, and slept for an hour.

All this to harvest dried, ocher-colored ears of corn meant to decorate the autumn table.

Like the gossamer layer of ash and dust that is settling on the trees in Central California, climate change is adding on to the hazards already faced by some of the country’s poorest, most neglected laborers. So far this year, more than 7,000 fires have scorched 1.4 million acres, and there is no reprieve in sight, officials warned.”

“. . . .  The valley is abnormally dry in parts, and in drought in others. Dust swirls up from the fields like a genie. Many creek beds are parched. The rivers have been twisted and bent every which way to bring water from the north for the fields. Since mid-August, for over two weeks, daily high temperatures have ranged from 97 degrees Fahrenheit to 108″

Opinion | The Senate Is on Vacation While Americans Starve – By Janet Yellen and Jared Bernstein – The New York Times

By Janet Yellen and Jared Bernstein

Ms. Yellen is a former chair of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

• Aug. 24, 2020

Credit…Woody Harrington

“It became clear this summer that public health measures across much of the country were relaxed too soon and without proper medical safeguards against the coronavirus. So now, once again, the commerce that Americans rely upon is retrenching. About 80 percent of Americans live in places that are pausing or dialing back reopening.

Yet the Senate left for its August recess without a compromise plan on a coronavirus relief bill for states, cities, the unemployed, businesses and the public health system. If senators still fail to resolve stalled negotiations when they return after Labor Day, millions of needy Americans will suffer — and the overall economy could degrade from its current slow rebound in growth to no growth at all.

Both monetary policy, which is the Federal Reserve’s job, and fiscal policy, the job of the federal government, have complementary roles to play in supporting the economy. (State governments can’t help because their revenues are plummeting and they are mandated to balance their budgets, which require spending cuts and layoffs and only add to the economy’s woes.)

The economics of this moment are not complicated: A self-sustaining recovery cannot occur unless the virus is controlled. It is true that after the first shutdowns of March and April, the economy did begin, in May and June, to pull itself out of a deep, pandemic-induced hole, thanks in part to generous $600 per week federal unemployment assistance that the Senate let expire in July after negotiations between Democrats and Republicans broke down.”

Opinion | Republican Convention: Best and Worst Moments From Night 1 – The New York Times

Jamelle Bouie Nikki Haley’s speech. In 2015, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who saw Black Americans and other nonwhites as threats to America as he imagined it, walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., prayed with a group of Black worshipers and then killed them. Toward the end of her speech, Haley cited the aftermath of this event to rebuke Black Lives Matter protesters, contrasting the reaction there with the protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Weaponizing the massacre in Charleston for the sake of attacking protests against police brutality — in a speech urging the country to re-elect a president who ran explicitly on racist resentment and reactionary nostalgia — was obscene.

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Wi-Fi – The New York Times

By Joel Santo Domingo

Mr. Santo Domingo is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter, a product recommendation site owned by The New York Times Company.

• Aug. 24, 2020

“For anyone used to working in a traditional office, working from home has revealed just how telecommuting-unfriendly a living space can be. While it may be uncomfortable to sit in a bad office chair or type under dim overhead lighting, a bad internet connection can really impede your productivity — or even grind it to a halt. Between Zoom meetings and remote learning, coupled with more members of the household hogging up bandwidth, you might have noticed a slower-than-usual connection.

As a senior writer at Wirecutter, a New York Times company that reviews and recommends products, who specializes in network devices, even I have had to contend with adequate, but not great, Wi-Fi connections.

Common causes for a crawling Wi-Fi connection include using the subpar router rented (for a fee!) from an internet service provider; a home with rooms far from a router; or a router that requires an extra boost to reach a corner of the home office, backyard patio or the surveillance camera over the garage door.

While every scenario is different, the symptoms are the same. Smart speakers disconnect from the internet, kids will gripe about buffering when swiping to the 15th TikTok in a row, or you may experience choppy audio and video on a work call (the worst sin of all).”

Opinion | For Conservatives to Have Any Hope, Trump Has to Lose – By Peter Wehner – The New York Times

By Peter Wehner

Contributing Opinion Writer

• Aug. 24, 2020
• • 462

Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

” “You’re a traitor to the cause.”

In one form or another, that’s the charge most often made against so-called Never Trumpers, a group of which I consider myself an early and unofficial co-founder. The well-being of both the Republican Party and conservatism, according to this line of thinking, requires supporting Donald Trump. To be against him is to be an apostate.

Now it is certainly true that in the short run, and possibly in the long run, too, many of us no longer consider the Republican Party our political home. But for me, at least, a conservative approach to politics continues to lie at the core of my political being — and it is for that very reason that I believe even more strongly now, after what we have seen during Trump’s first term, that any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second.

Put another way, to be anti-Trump is not to be anti-conservative; and to be pro-Trump is not to be pro-conservative.

That doesn’t mean that Mr. Trump doesn’t have any conservative policy successes he can claim. He does, though even here Mr. Trump’s record is not nearly as strong as his Republican defenders claim it is. From a conservative perspective, he’s gotten some things right and many things wrong.

The president is reshaping the judiciary in a conservative direction through his court appointments, but he has also given up on core conservative beliefs in limited government and responsible entitlement reform. He’s shredded federalism and embraced protectionism, both of which cut against conservative principles. It was also on Mr. Trump’s watch that, even before the pandemic hit, the United States set record annual deficits and exceeded $22 trillion in debt. (If Joe Biden becomes president, prepare for Republicans to rediscover a rhetorical commitment to fiscal discipline.)”

Opinion | Fleeing the Trolls for the Grizzly Bears – By Nicholas Kristof – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• Aug. 22, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
• • 85

The author and his daughter, Caroline, near Montana’s Northwest Peak.Credit…Adam Ellis Harper

“PACIFIC NORTHWEST TRAIL, Mont. — What’s a person to do in a crazy summer when our president endorses a candidate who claims the world is controlled by a “global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles,” when federal agents club a Navy veteran protesting peacefully, when the government delays postal services to impede voting (and thereby kills chicks sent in the mail)?

Take a hike.

For wilderness therapy, I came here to Montana to escape the hubbub and embrace the mountains, to sip from creeks, to sleep under the stars, to negotiate with honest interlocutors, like grizzly bears.

Over seven years, my daughter, Caroline, and I hiked the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, running from Mexico to Canada on the West coast. So with that trail behind us, we’ve started another adventure — hiking the newest of America’s grand trails.

In 2009, President Obama signed legislation creating the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail — known informally as the Pacific Northwest Trail. It runs from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, hugging the Canadian border, but it sometimes exists more on paper than on the ground.

Some 1,200 miles long, the Pacific Northwest Trail was cobbled together from existing trails and forest roads, so every now and then you get to the end of a trail and the guidebook tells you: Bushwhack seven miles until you get to the next trail.

That’s what happened to us on a Montana mountain called Northwest Peak. We forged our own trail and cowboy camped that night on a high (and freezing) ridge above timberline — soothed at night by a spectacular sunset to our west, and awoken by an even more vivid palette of reds to the east.

We then hiked and crawled over boulders along a knife edge of a ridge, thousand-foot drops on each side. It was terrifying and exhilarating to see a pebble skitter from your feet and plunge down — forever. It was some of the toughest hiking I’ve ever done on any trail (partly because there wasn’t a trail), and also some of the most glorious. This is why the Pacific Northwest Trail is often called “America’s wildest trail.”

I backpack every summer because it’s wonderful family time, when none of us can be distracted by phones, emails or screens, when we share the camaraderie of blisters and bugs — and awe. My wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and Caroline’s boyfriend, Adam Ellis Harper, joined the journey this year.”