Ugly Sweaters, Beautiful Memories

Can a person acquire an immunity to propaganda? I’ve been wondering. It was Julia Ioffe who got me started. She wrote last week of the dwindling effectiveness of the Russian disinformation industry. She reports that the bot-farms that caused all the mischief in 2016 are now a shadow of their former selves.

And just like that, it’s gone. MTV.com is gone. Kaput. Wiped off the face of the Earth. Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty-plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written.

In a hugely consequential case, the Supreme Court sided (6-3) with the Biden Administration regarding how White House officials and other government officials communicate with social media companies regarding posts on their sites. The opinion (Murthy v. Missouri) stated that the challengers did not have legal standing to even bring the case.

Newsmax guest host Corey Lewandowski -- who I assume could become a permanent fixture on the network given that he's a woman-abusing piece of shit -- is concerned about straight white men being poorly treated by "bossy women." Perhaps he should have stuck up for his wife instead of (allegedly!) having a yearslong affair with married South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who may or may not go out on puppy shooting hunts together.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned Friday that her right-wing colleagues' finding that American citizens have no right to have their foreign spouses admitted to the United States will disproportionately harm same-sex couples—and could foreshadow a future reversal of federal LGBTQ+ marriage equality. The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines in Department of State v.

As the death toll in Gaza continues to grow amid Israel’s punishing bombardment of the Strip, so too does another statistic: the missing children. To date, at least 21,000 children are missing amid the chaos of the war, according to a new report by Save the Children—a figure the charity says includes 17,000 children who are unaccompanied or separated from their families as a result of the war and the 4,000 children who are thought to be missing under the rubble, as well as the untold number of children who have either been detained by Israeli forces or have been recently discovered in mass graves. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] As with all of the statistics coming out of Gaza—including the more than 37,000-person death toll, a figure that is tracked by the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry and which is considered reliable by the U.