Donald Trump and Fox host Laura Ingraham. She has advised him his legacy will be tarnished if he refuses to concede. Photograph: SMG/REX/Shutterstock
Ed note: Asking Trump to exit gracefully in order to remain a “king maker” in the 2022 and 2024 elections, is now being asked by Fox and other Rupert Murdoch media outlets. It appears to be too much for Trump to handle such a plea.
From The Guardian: Multiple Rupert Murdoch-owned conservative media outlets in the United States have shifted their messaging in a seeming effort to warn readers and viewers that Donald Trump may well have lost the presidential election.
The new messaging appears to be closely coordinated, and it includes an appeal to Trump to preserve his “legacy” by showing grace in defeat. The message is being carried on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post – all outlets avidly consumed by Trump himself, especially Fox.
One Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, an intimate of the president ever since she spoke at the 2016 Republican national convention, made an astounding statement that seemed directed at Trump personally, advising him to accept defeat “if and when that does happen” with “grace and composure” and appealing to his sense of his own legacy.
Ingraham said in part: “If and when it’s time to accept an unfavourable outcome in this election, and we hope it never comes, but if and when that does happen, president Trump needs to do it with the same grace and composure he demonstrated at that town hall with Savannah Guthrie. So many people remarked about his tone and presence. Exactly what he needs.
“Now losing, especially when you believe the process wasn’t fair, it’s a gut punch. And I’m not conceding anything tonight, by the way. But losing, if that’s what happens – it’s awful. But president Trump’s legacy will only become more significant if he focuses on moving the country forward.”
The Wall Street Journal has published an opinion piece with almost the exact same message. It is titled “The Presidential Endgame” and subtitled “Trump has the right to fight in court, but he needs evidence to prove voter fraud”.
“Mr Trump’s legacy will be diminished greatly if his final act is a bitter refusal to accept a legitimate defeat,” the piece warns.
Here is how the article opened: “Perhaps it was inevitable that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign would end as his presidency began: with the president claiming victory and his frenzied antagonists denouncing him as a would-be fascist. The reality is that the US can and probably will have a normal election outcome regardless of the shouting between now and then.
“Mr Biden is leading in enough states to win the presidency, and if those votes survive recounts and legal challenges, he will be the next president.”
The New York Post – which before the election was the launch vehicle for wild and desperate attacks on Joe Biden’s son Hunter – has produced a front page that all but proclaims a Biden victory.
Top editors at the Post have “told some staff members this week to be tougher in their coverage” of Trump, the New York Times reported, citing two anonymous employees of the paper.
The Times piece said: “On Thursday, in a sudden about-face, Rupert Murdoch’s scrappy tabloid published two articles with a wildly different tone. One accused the president of making an ‘unfounded claim that political foes were trying to steal the election’. The headline on the other described Donald Trump Jr as the ‘panic-stricken’ author of a ‘clueless tweet’.”
News coverage at Fox News has similarly shown little patience with the lies about voter fraud Trump is advancing in hopes of reversing the election.
Asked about the Trump campaign’s assertion that Republican observers had not been allowed to observe vote-counting, the Fox correspondent states flatly: “That’s not true. It’s not true. It’s just not true.”
Laura Ingraham prepares her audience for the likely possibility that the President will lose the election pic.twitter.com/tG50EIHj60
Ed note: This article is a reminder that life isn’t just about competition and survival. It’s also about compassion and support of one another.
From Aeon by Lydia Syson:Five years had passed since Czar Alexander II promised the emancipation of the serfs. Trusting in a map drawn on bark with the point of a knife by a Tungus hunter, three Russian scientists set out to explore an area of trackless mountain wilderness stretching across eastern Siberia. Their mission was to find a direct passage between the gold mines of the river Lena and Transbaikalia. Their discoveries would transform understanding of the geography of northern Asia, opening up the route eventually followed by the Trans-Manchurian Railway. For one explorer, now better known as an anarchist than a scientist, this expedition was also the start of a long journey towards a new articulation of evolution and the strongest possible argument for a social revolution.
Prince Peter Kropotkin, the aristocratic graduate of an elite Russian military academy, travelled in 1866 with his zoologist friend Ivan Poliakov and a topographer called Maskinski. Boat and horseback took them to the Tikono-Zadonsk gold mine. From there, they continued with 10 Cossacks, 50 horses carrying three months’ supply of food, and an old Yukaghir nomad guide who’d made the journey 20 years earlier.
Peter Kropotkin, biologist, anarchist and geographer. Public domain photo.
Kropotkin and Poliakov – enthusiastic, curious and well-read young men in their 20s – were fired by the prospect of finding evidence of that defining factor of evolution set out by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859): competition. They were disappointed. As Kropotkin later wrote:
We saw plenty of adaptations for struggling, very often in common, against the adverse circumstances of climate, or against various enemies, and Polyakoff wrote many a good page upon the mutual dependency of carnivores, ruminants, and rodents in their geographical distribution; we witnessed numbers of facts of mutual support … [but] facts of real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them.
Thank you for expressing interest in joining AARP Washington, BECU and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) in supporting the new Fact Check Ambassador Program to help identify misinformation in social media and elsewhere in your digital neighborhoods. The first project our team of volunteers (all of you) will be focusing on is misinformation around the 2020 elections – the so-called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) project.
For those of you who could not make the October 30 training featuring Dr. Jevin West and his colleagues from the UW, or for those who wish to view it again, we are providing a recording of the training (found here).
We also want to take this opportunity to provide some resources that were mentioned during the training that may be helpful as we all begin submitting mis/disinformation for the 2020 election project.
Firstly, below is a list of the links that will be helpful as you submit examples:
2) Fact Check Ambassador Volunteers Landing Page (Link also in Step-by-Step Guide)
3) Potential mis/disinformation Submission Form (Link also on Landing Page)
4) Potential mis/disinformation Email Template (Link also on Landing Page)
5) Our email address for submissions and questions is: disinfotips@uw.edu
6) You can find a link to the slides from the presentation here.
One important note, the examples we reviewed are already confirmed cases of mis/disinformation; when you come across something during your day-to-day routine chances are that you will not know if it is true or not, which is okay! We want you to submit potential election-related mis/disinformation, at which point the CIP will dig deeper into anything you send our way. Also, The CIP will be working with AARP to coordinate updates that provide further information on what kind of mis/disinformation we will be looking for post-election, so keep an eye on your inbox.
The Center for an Informed Public (CIP) is taking the lead on managing the volunteers participating in the EIP project this fall. If you have not sent your email address to CIP to receive updates directly from them, please do so. You can forward your contact email to disinfotips@uw.edu. Also, CIP will be holding office hours to answer questions that come up as you begin to look for potential mis/disinformation. During these times please feel free to stop in the provided Zoom room and ask any questions you have around how/what to submit. Office hours will be held on the days and times listed below:
Finally, AARP is going to be working with the UW and BECU to develop a speaker’s bureau which will train folks to give virtual presentations on the topic of how to spot misinformation. This project is still in early development, but If you would like more information about becoming a speaker, contact Ashley Aitken from AARP Washington at aaitken@aarp.org.
Best,
AARP Washington and the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington
Thanks to Ann M. — To the UW Medicine Community: As we prepare for elections tomorrow, we want to remind you to stay aware and make plans in case we experience any post-election disruptions. While we do not currently have any actionable intelligence about specific planned disruptions, we are working closely with our local and federal law enforcement partners to assist our planning.
We also want to share some reminders for precautions that you can take: Plan for delays and traffic disruptions by allowing extra time for your commute to and from work. Carry your UW Medicine badge and workplace identification with you for access to our hospitals and clinics. Be prepared to stay at work past your scheduled hours, if necessary. Maintain awareness of your surroundings and be alert for demonstrations as you enter your workplace. To receive official information via text messages, please register for UW Medicine STAT INFO ADVISORY: http://depts.washington.edu/statinfo/
Your site security director will provide updates as new information becomes available.
Thank you for your support of our emergency preparedness plans. Sincerely,
A right-wing protester armed with an AR-15 style rifle looks at Black Lives Matter counterprotesters who are across the street, in Salem, Oregon, Sept. 7, 2020. Hundreds of people gathered for a pro-President Donald Trump rally just over a week after a member of a far-right group was fatally shot after a Trump caravan went through Portland. (Andrew Selsky/AP)
When Olympia Police Officer Tiffany Coates’ cruiser rolled into a gun shop parking lot, she knew dozens of armed men were waiting for her. She wasn’t concerned.
Vigilantes with the group Three Percent of Washington, carrying AR-15 rifles, waved warmly as Coates arrived. A few minutes later Coates was smiling for a camera, flanked by nine paramilitaries.
Posted on social media as the Black Lives Matters protests unfolded in June, that photo of a grinning cop surrounded by armed, camouflage-clad men fed the worst fears of residents who for days had complained to police about armed men following and intimidating protesters. It was proof to some that police, amid an upsurge in guns sales, were coddling vigilantes they should be arresting.
“As a Black woman, I am scared right now … to live in a ZIP code where officers actively affiliate themselves with armed, white vigilantes, who have made their paranoid, suspicious hatred of my people an inescapable presence in my life,” Olympia resident Elisa McGee told the city council in June. She demanded that Coates be fired. That didn’t happen. (In fact, this month she was honored as “Officer of the Year” by the Olympia post of the American Legion.)
Now, as a contentious Election Day approaches, the ability of law enforcement to respond to vigilantes and possible paramilitary actions remains an open and pressing question.
InvestigateWest is a Seattle-based nonprofit newsroom producing journalism for the common good. Learn more and sign up to receive alerts about future stories here.
Paramilitary organizations are illegal in Washington and many other states. But the laws meant to stop the formation of ad hoc armies are archaic and vague, so much so that police and prosecutors who have had the opportunity to use those laws recently describe them as unenforceable.
Not that any have tried. Despite the rise in paramilitary activity, nowhere in the state have members of those armed, organized groups been prosecuted for violations of the state’s anti-paramilitary laws, according to interviews with law enforcement leaders and extremism experts. Rather than being prosecuted, the melange of AR-15-carrying, camouflage-clad vigilante groups has been called on by a handful of politicians to provide “security,” as President Donald Trump suggested that one high-profile group “stand back and stand by.”
Tensions are high as hundreds of members of the Washington National Guard are ready to support local police if civil unrest does break out. That unrest could manifest in a number of ways — including protests much like those seen this summer — but the possibility of paramilitary action presents a particular unknown.
Shortly before Halloween in 2018, an administrative building at Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve in Alaska began to sprout a beard.
But the strands that composed the furry fringe weren’t fine brown hairs. They were the spindly legs of hundreds of tightly clustered daddy longlegs, letting their glorious gams dangle free.
The ability of Opiliones species, also known as harvestmen, to form these woolly knots has fascinated arachnid enthusiasts for years. But “we still don’t really know what triggers these aggregations,” said Mercedes Burns, an evolutionary biologist who studies the eight-legged creatures at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
One leading hypothesis posits that Opiliones get together to keep from drying out when humidity levels drop in the summer or fall, Dr. Burns said. As their nickname implies, most daddy longlegs are built like grains of rice buoyed by super-skinny stilts, saddling them with “a big surface-area-to-volume ratio problem,” she said.
With few spots to store water and plenty of places from which to lose it, the arachnids rapidly parch. Hunkering down together creates a microclimate for the arachnids, not unlike a sweaty locker room, that can stall the desiccation process.
A History Link Essay – posted in 2019 by Rita Cipalla. (Thanks to Ann M.)
Richard Beyer: People Waiting for the Interrban, 1978 cast aluminum sculpture
Richard Beyer: People Waiting for the Interurban, 1978 cast aluminum sculpture.
A History Link Essay – posted in 2019 by Rita Cipalla
On June 17, 1978, a life-size, cast-aluminum sculpture depicting five adults, a child-in-arms, and a dog with a human face, all waiting for a trolley car, is dedicated at noon in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood during the Fremont Fair. Situated on a triangular space at the corner of N 34th Street and Fremont Avenue N, close to the Fremont Bridge, the statue was created by local sculptor Richard S. Beyer (1925-2012), whose studio is on Lake Union. Beyer moved with his family to Seattle in 1957, initially intending to pursue an academic career. Part way through a Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Washington, he quit to become an artist. People Waiting for the Interurban is his first large-scale, multi-figure cast aluminum commission.
Tribute to a Bygone Era Richard Beyer’s selection to create a piece of public art for Fremont came about by accident. The Fremont Im- provement Committee, of which Beyer was a member, was looking for ways to promote the neighborhood. The location for some kind of installation — a bench or signage, for example — had already been determined: A triangu- lar spot close to the Fremont Bridge which was slated for paving by the city. Beyer suggested an art competition. The committee approved the idea and the art contest moved forward, but it didn’t attract a single entry. Beyer, whose foundry was in Fremont and who had spent more than a decade trying to establish his art career, volun- teered to create a sculpture for the space. He went door to door seeking pledges. Once a few donations rolled in, he came up with several concepts.
His first idea was to create a statue depicting a ship rising out of the water to capitalize on Fremont’s location on a ship canal. He discarded that idea and proposed another, a cougar. That didn’t work out either. When he heard that pieces of the Interurban, the electric trolley line that operated between Seattle and Everett from 1910 to 1939, might be buried near the Fremont Bridge, he knew he had found the perfect subject matter.
Many of our best presidents have been underestimated. Truman was seen as the tool of a corrupt political machine. Eisenhower was supposedly a bumbling middlebrow. Grant was thought a taciturn simpleton. Even F.D.R. was once considered a lightweight feather duster.
I’ve been reading Joe Biden’s speeches and I’m beginning to think even his supporters are underestimating him.
He’s walking across treacherous cultural ground, confronting conflicts that are shredding the nation, and he’s mastering them with ease.
Biden is campaigning in a country that has lost faith in itself. Sixty-six percent of Americans believe our nation is in decline, according to a study from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
He’s also running in the middle of a political and cultural civil war. Eighty-two percent of Biden voters believe that “Donald Trump would like to gradually transform our country into a dictatorship,” according to that I.A.S.C. study. Ninety percent of Trump voters believe that the Democrats want to gradually turn America into a socialist country. According to a survey conducted by Braver Angels, a group that sponsors bipartisan conversations, 70 percent of Americans believe that if the “wrong” candidate wins, “America will not recover.”
Biden is campaigning in a land filled with fear, hatred and apocalyptic thinking. It would be so easy for him to reflect that fear and hate back to voters. That’s what Trump does.
But Biden is not doing that. Never in my life have I seen a candidate so confidently avoid wedge issues. Biden is instead running on the conviction that, despite it all, Americans deeply love their country, and viscerally long for its unity. He’s running with the knowledge that when you ask America about the greatest threats to our future, “political polarization and divisiveness” comes out No. 1.
It’s easy to say you’re for healing division. But here’s what Biden has actually done:
He’s de-ideologized this election. He’s made the campaign mostly about dealing with Covid-19. That’s a practical problem, not an ideological one. Conservatives and moderates don’t have to renounce their whole philosophy to vote for him. They can just say they’re voting for the person who can take care of this.
He’s separated politics from the culture war. Over the past generation, culture war issues have increasingly swallowed our politics. Trump has put this process into overdrive. He barely talks about policies. Instead, his every subject is really about why “our” identity group is better than “their” identity group.
So now the positions people take — on issues ranging from climate change to immigration — are determined by whether they see themselves as part of the rural white Christian conservative army or part of the urban multicultural secular progressive army. Policies are no longer debated discretely; they are just battles in one big, existential fight over who we are.
But Biden goes back to the New Deal, to an era of policymaking when there really wasn’t a polarized culture war. He sidesteps the Kulturkampf issues — which statues to take down — to simply talk about helping the middle class.
Biden has scrambled the upscale/downscale dynamic. The most important fissure in our politics is education levels. The Democratic Party’s greatest long-term challenge is that it might become the party of the highly credentialed college-educated class and let some future Republican rally a multiracial working-class coalition. Even Trump is now making surprising gains among Latino and Black men.
Biden has avoided all the little microaggressions that cultural elites use to show they are morally superior. Wokeness, for example, is partly about fighting oppression, but it’s also become a status symbol. It’s showing people that you are so intellectually evolved that you can use words like intersectionality, decolonizing and cultural appropriation. Political correctness is not just a means for the less privileged to set standards of behavior; it is also sometimes the way people with cultural power push others around.
Unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, Biden has a worldview and a manner that is both educated class and working class and defuses the divide.
Biden has avoided the stupid binaries about race. Donald Trump went to Mount Rushmore and made a speech essentially saying you can either believe in systemic racism or you can love America. Biden went to Gettysburg and argued that you can “honestly face systemic racism” and love America. He argued that you can believe in fighting racism and believe in law and order. His worldview is based on universal categories — the things we share — not identitarian ones — the ways we supposedly can’t understand each other across difference.
He’s done a good job reaching out to white evangelicals. Right now, many of them think he’s a godless socialist who will usher in a reign of anti-religious terror. In his campaign he’s done a pretty good job reaching out to those voters. His campaign has run ads on Christian radio and reached out aggressively to evangelical leaders. If he can allay their cultural fears (by making it clear he will not shut down Christian charitable groups) and win them over with working-class economic policies, he can create a long-term governing majority.
Seventy percent of Americans in that Braver Angels survey say America is facing permanent harm, but 70 percent also say the most important job after the election is to heal our enmity, to do the hard job of working with people whose views we find completely objectionable. This unity impulse is powerful in the populace, but it is deeply hidden.
