Let’s talk about how the attempted take-over of the US Capitol came to pass. For months leading up to the general election, Pres. Trump sowed the seeds of doubt in the election, repeatedly tweeting that it would be “rigged”. (Thread)

Hyper-partisan right wing media and social media influencers cultivated that doubt. They amplified his rigged claims, and combed the internet for stories that they could fit into their developing theories of voter fraud.
Ballots from 2018 round in a recycling bin? Fraud! Ballots accidentally discarded in a trash can? Fraud! An information card mailed to an old address in CA (mislabeled as a “ballot”)? Fraud!

This started in September and continues today.
If you look closely, you can see the same set of actors mobilizing again and again and again to spread these false claims. From accounts affiliated with right wing media and right wing political organizations to members of Trump’s inner circle. And of course, the Pres. himself.
Here’s a table we generated from months of work at the @2020Partnership of false/misleading information “incidents” on Twitter, from August through November:
@2020Partnership We did see some false claims about election procedures spread left-leaning networks, but when we look at the accounts that REPEATEDLY spread false claims about the election — primarily around “voter fraud” — these were overwhelming RW influencers & most were blue-check (verified)
Going into the election, Trump and his close associates, including his adult sons (who eventually helped spread >20 false narratives), called for an “Army for Trump” to go to the polls and gather evidence of the voter fraud he told them to look for. And so they did.
Republican lawmakers in battleground states had ensured that the mail-in votes (which leaned heavily Dem b/c Trump told his followers they weren’t safe) would be counted after the polls closed… which set the stage for a period of uncertainty and shifting vote counts.
In the days after the election, Trump and his supporters in right wing media and on social media leveraged that uncertainty and shifting vote counts (the blue wave) to feed their efforts to assemble “evidence” of voter fraud.
They collaborated with their online audiences to craft conspiracy theories of mass voter fraud, weaving together — from the great stores of social media content — a number of misinterpretations, figments of imaginations, and outright fabrications of alleged fraud.
They — Trump and his collaborators — then took these conspiracy theories to court, to try to contest the election, where they were thrown out time and time again, as baseless, unfounded, and in many cases the work of charlatans.
When they couldn’t get support for their reality from the courts, they took a final desperate tact.
On Jan 6, we saw a crowd of hashtag-Patriot accounts, motivated by manufactured grievance, attempt a violent take-over of the U.S. Capitol to stop Pres. Trump’s “sacred landslide victory” from being stolen by “evil” people. Online conspiracy theories manifesting in insurrection.

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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.

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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".