While its sister sites shuffled through owners and staff revolts over the past half-decade, Gawker was viewed as a poisoned asset the result of both its late-in-life legal problems and its reputation in more staid quarters as a violator of journalistic norms. (I always liked Hamilton Nolan’s take: “Most journalism jobs exist on a continuum between audience and freedom. If you want a lot of people to pay attention to you, you work at a place where the individual writer’s voice is completely subsumed into the institutional voice. If you want complete freedom to write whatever the hell you want, you write on your personal Tumblr, where the whole world will ignore you. Gawker was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audience and almost complete freedom.”)2
The right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through tricky changes to election law without a full-throated acknowledgment of what lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.
One such slippage took place last week when the American Mind a publication of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank based in California published an incendiary essay arguing that the country has already been destroyed by internal enemies.
“Most people living in the United States today certainly more than half are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-Ame
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Covid-19 sneaked into the world like a thief in the night, so it’ll never be easy to give a precise date for when it began or when it will end. Still, there are a few rough milestones that can be used to mark its progress through our lives.
The first Covid cases might even have entered the United States as early as December 2019. The first recorded Covid death in this country occurred last February. State governments lagged in responding, with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declaring a state of emergency only on March 7. While some schools in New York announced closings the following days, a full shutdown didn’t start until a week later.