Category: You Should See This

Matthew Feldman, a professor at the University of York who studies right-wing extremism, said that November 3rd has all the hallmarks of being a potential “trigger moment.” He told me that polarization is growing on both sides, but he, too, believes that the far right represents a more lethal threat. “At the fringes on the right, a narrative is building that the left is stealing the election,” he said, warning that extremists may decide that “their way of life” will disappear “if they don’t take action.” But, he added, would-be attackers often await a signal from leaders that violence is acceptable. “Scholars have long talked about a kind of license that comes from the top,” Feldman told me. “One of the surest signs of these trigger events is an increasingly apocalyptic tone. And, of course, the biggest culprit has been Donald Trump.”

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

When I asked Greene about the alleged affair, she replied by texting me a series of screenshots from Chambers’s social-media accounts, including a photo of the sign he put up on his gym. “Let me be clear with you,” Greene texted. “Writing defamatory articles about me is a very bad choice. Be very wise in who your ‘sources’ are.” She also directed me to her attorney, L. Lin Wood, who has lately been suggesting, on Twitter, that Trump’s political opponents deliberately infected the President with the novel coronavirus. When sent a series of claims and allegations about Greene that are addressed in this piece, Wood responded by insisting that the piece was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements, and agenda driven lies”—but, like Greene, he did not specifically refute or deny any of the particular allegations or claims presented to him.

He also circulated an e-mail that one of the medical chairs had sent to his department. “Now is the time to accept the hazards of caring for the sick . . . rather than focusing on making a few extra dollars,” that e-mail read. “I am not indifferent to your anxieties but personally feel demanding hazard pay is not becoming of a compassionate and caring physician.”

For those defending themselves against the lawsuits, their attorneys’ power of discovery would give them extraordinary access to Alfa Bank’s records. But Aven, Khan, and Fridman claim that they do not control their own documents at the bank and cannot produce them. (Public records show that together they control more than sixty per cent of the bank.)

Employees had questions about where Tron was headed and submitted anonymous questions for BitTorrent’s traditional Q&A with the company’s senior leadership. Hours before the Q&A, Sun called together his marketing team “to send him the list of questions,” so he could censor questions he didn’t like, says a former employee officially briefed on the meeting. Sun started reading existential questions about Tron’s future, such as, “What if TRX [Tron’s crypto] drops to zero?” Sun’s mood soured instantly. “He took it extremely personally.” According to the employee, he began yelling and threw a tantrum. “Whoever asked this question, we’re going to track them down,” Sun seethed, before threatening “to kill their entire family.”

Anna studied him. She has blond hair, cut asymmetrically, and wore a cobalt-blue shirt. “No,” she said. “You’re a good example of post-traumatic growth.” In 2004, she had accompanied her father to the site one last time before the towers came down. At dinner, she said that in footage of that visit “you can see the exact moment when you realize this is a stillbirth. You’re brokenhearted. You were misunderstood, blackmailed, your reputation was murdered.”