Based on the latest info I could find, here's why what happened on Jan. 6th was worse than we thought.

It was coordinated. This was not merely a crowd of protestors accidentally incited to storm the Capitol by the intemperance of the President & other speakers at the rally.

I wrote a book about the Fairness Doctrine and how it was responsible for one of the worst episodes of government censorship in US history.

So I am somewhat alarmed at the calls percolating on Twitter for a new, internet Fairness Doctrine. This is a thread about why that is.

Let's start with what most people think when they hear "Fairness Doctrine." They imagine a time at an indeterminate point in the past when mass media was reasonable, balanced, equitable, and fair. It was a veritable golden age of mass media and the Fairness Doctrine was to thank.

Back then, radio & tv stations couldn't just air their opinions, spreading unchecked misinformation. No, they had to let the other side of any given issue have a say, giving the good guys a chance to check the bad guys when they told bald lies.

However, the problem with this narrative is that it is almost entirely a myth. In actuality, the Fairness Doctrine was a tool wielded by political interests in order to suppress dissident speech & prevent activists (from both Left & Right) from exposing the lies of the powerful.

But telling that story requires going back before the first major test of the Fairness Doctrine in 1963, before the rules were created in 1949, all the way back to the first meaningful attempt at federal regulation of radio in 1927.

Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.

So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.

The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be

Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.

But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.

And that would be big(!)...if it were at all true. It is not. Indeed, if you go to the hyperlink, you'll find that SSC's purported "alignment" has nothing to do with Murray's "Bell Curve."

What SSC & Murray agree about is that poverty is partly hereditable and thus very sticky, so much so that the proposition job retraining programs will meaningfully address mass economic disruption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

If a critical mass of people on twitter generate enough Section 230 hot takes, all that energy fuses to create renewed interest in the #FairnessDoctrine.

I wrote a book on the FD so let me walk you through why reviving it would be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

First, the Fairness Doctrine was responsible for the most successful episode of government censorship of the past half century. While the Fairness Doctrine was technically created to encourage fair and balanced coverage of “controversial issues of public importance"...

...in the 1960s the Kennedy administration weaponized it to punish conservative radio critics. You see, fairness is in the eye of the beholder--which is the FCC--and the person who appoints the commissioners--the president--gets a say in what looks fair or foul.

(JFK also launched targeted IRS audits of his right-wing radio antagonists; the power to tax is the power to destroy, after all.) Stations responded to the secretly government-organized pressure by dropping conservative broadcasters in order to avoid Fairness Doctrine complaints.

And lest you think this Fairness Doctrine stuff is just conservative bellyaching, bear in mind that the Nixon administration used the threat of Fairness Doctrine enforcement to help bring television network heads to heel.

A story ...

In 1994, I was teaching U.S. history and American government at Oak Ridge HS in El Dorado Hills, California.

I had three bright students who were my TAs. The 20th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation was a few months away. I decided to have ... 1/

my students -- Sherilyn Peek, Aaron Leahy and Nicole Poimiroo -- take on an extra project. They contacted dozens of people who were in some way involved with the Watergate saga. Politicians, lawyers, political appointees, journalists and others. 2/

They spent weeks, before the internet existed, tracking down addresses. Then they sent a short letter that asked the recipients to respond to one question: What should America learn from Watergate?

Before long, responses started to show up in my mailbox at school. 3/

Archibald Cox replied, and I'm especially struck by this sentence: "...we should be reminded of the corrupt influence of great power, especially when the power is in the hands of someone who is willing to resort to any tactics, however wrong, to retain and increase his power."4/

Richard Kleindienst wrote his response by hand ... "Our Constitution worked! The federal judiciary worked. The Congress and a free press worked. That our Constitution works is the magic of America." 5/

CAPITOL RIOT QUESTIONS FOR SPEAKER PELOSI: There is no group in America more interested in the safety and security of the Capitol than members of Congress. To that end, members have asked @SpeakerPelosi to answer these basic questions:

1/ What was your role in authorizing or denying National Guard support before and after Jan. 6?

2/ Reps. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Comer R-Ky., on Feb. 15 asked you five pointed questions about your role in Jan. 6 and your preservation and compliance with document requests. Will you answer them?

3/ After the 2011 shooting of now-former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., what changed with regard to security?

4/ After the shooting of Republican House Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., were any changes made to security?

In 2009, I studied the history of the FBI/CIA and also the Hitler regime (research for a book). I expected it to be a dull errand, not a horrific realization that the evil methods of operation of US agencies were often indistinguishable in their actions from the N regime. AND...

2) I found no evidence whatsoever that these abhorrent programs had stopped. Quite the opposite... I kept waiting for the books to get to the part where the programs ended, were properly disclosed/exposed, all went to prison, victims were compensated, and these agencies prevented

3) from ever conducting unethical operations against their own citizens and others ever again... But... no. That part of the books wasn't written. We can only conclude then, that the operations are still ongoing. Even programs that were supposedly forced to end have many signs

4) of simply changing the name of the program/operation and shifting things around to look like something else... nope, just a continuation of the same unlawful evil thing as before. Except, year after year, the tech capabilities rose, and the level of wickedness had to also rise

5) As society became progressive, there wasn't much left that society universally labels a "compromising position": activities rejected as unacceptable, unforgivable, unpardonable & if caught- jailed or fired. Blackmail doesn't work if all human activity is accepted and defended

For 25 years, the GOP has had almost exclusive control of the FL legislature & admin.

It fashioned every law it could to advantage Republicans, gerrymandered at a bionic level & stymied popular efforts to increase voter participation such as restoration of felon voting rights.

During that same time, the FL GOP poured MILLIONS into turning the state party into a sophisticated, permanent, well-funded voter contact machine.

This gave GOP candidates two massive advantages: 1) they didn’t have to spend on selling the GOP position, 2) all of

in-state messaging got backed up by the RNC, and most importantly, the constant drum beat of Fox News.

There is no biological way to overstate the advantage that Fox News gives to Republicans in red states. MSNBC is NOT the opposite of Fox News.

MSNBC does not structure its programming around whipping up white grievance and fear. Whereas Fox News is the propaganda arm of the RNC, MSNBC is the left leaning version of CNN, not the DNC.

So when I say that Fox News is a huge advantage for the GOP, I know of what I speak.

In FL, Dem candidates spend a inordinate amount of time debunking Fox News lies, even to died in the wool Dems.

Because GOP candidates at every level do not have to spend on messaging, and so not have to spend on attacking Dem policy, they spend almost exclusively on 2 things: