conservative author and activist Dinesh D’Souza wrote a book, “Obama’s America,” full of gross speculations about the sex life of the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who was a pioneering anthropologist. “Ann’s sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger,” wrote D’Souza. He described her as a “playgirl” who used “her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men.”
D’Souza’s insinuations had little to do with his ostensible thesis, which was that Obama sought to undermine America. It was simply a timeworn insult — calling someone’s mom fat and promiscuous — that tells us nothing about Obama’s family, but a lot about D’Souza’s character.
.. D’Souza is a felon who, in 2014, pleaded guilty to routing illegal campaign donations through a woman he was having an affair with, and the woman’s husband.
.. At the time, D’Souza was married and serving as president of the evangelical King’s College. His ex-wife would later accuse him of physical abuse.
.. D’Souza pardon, like those of the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and the former Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby, is a message to Trump confederates facing legal trouble.
.. D’Souza was convicted of one of the same crimes, a campaign finance violation, that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is now being investigated for.
- .. the study estimating that around 4,600 people died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria
- outrage over migrant children ripped from their parents’ arms at the border;
- and an incipient trade war with our allies.
.. D’Souza, who made his name in the 1990s fighting campus political correctness, once had a reputation as a middlebrow conservative provocateur, but he’s really more gutter-dwelling troll.
.. In the Trump era, he’s become even worse. He mocked survivors of the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting who cried after the Florida Legislature voted down an assault weapons ban, tweeting, “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”
.. even if Trump was acting out of instinct rather than calculation, he has an intuitive ability to speak to his supporters’ dark impulses,
and an insatiable need to smash boundaries that constrained his predecessors.
.. Fascism, Ilyin wrote approvingly, is “a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” Trump has almost certainly never read this line, but he understands it.
How Russia Turned a Student Journalist’s Web Post into Fake News
Blacktavists, a Russian Facebook account modified a real news story about a Racism Hoax sign and a modified real student newspaper.
They count on the fact that people will take the image at face value and not do lateral contextual searches.
Jon Stewart’s Children, and Trolling the Press Corps
In the years after 9/11, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz; Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show”; Bassem Youssef; and the founders of Reductress. An alt-right blogger turned White House correspondent explains that journalism is only politics by other means. And the cartoonists Emily Flake and Drew Dernavich attempt to escape from an escape room.
White millennials are just as racist as their grandparents
David Duke is still around, but as a charismatic figurehead he has mostly been displaced by the likes of 39-year-old Richard Spencer, 26-year-old Matthew Heimbach and 29-year-old Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.
.. Some seem to be reactionaries, essentially trolls who may or may not truly believe the anti-Semitic and racist bile that they meme and share to get a rise out of the politically correct left. If youthful rebellion in the 1960s meant embracing free love, peace and equality, then today — at least for anti-anti-Trumpers — it is about promoting hatred and structural inequity.
.. It is a flawed system, after all, one whose recent financial crisis irreparably scarred millennials’ economic prospects. Most anti-establishment millennials have drifted toward leftist populist alternatives, but some have sorted into the opposite (and more violent) extreme. For right-wing populists, the key flaw with the system is not that it allows the rich to hoard all the money, but that it privileges undeserving minorities at innocent whites’ expense.
.. Just as “socialism” is not a toxic word to people who came of age after the Cold War, perhaps aligning with Nazis no longer seems as inherently, reflexively evil for those so far removed from World War II.
.. Millennials overall are more racially tolerant than earlier generations — but that’s because young people today are less likely to be white. White millennials exhibit about as much racial prejudice, as measured by explicit bias, as white Gen Xers and boomers.