Doctor RJ

Here's an an incomplete journey through the biggest blunders, gaffes and miscalculations in politics

Everyone makes mistakes. However, some mistakes have lasting implications that can redefine a public image, particularly when it comes to politics. The extent to which politics is a dynamic between faith in institutions, ideologies, and people is largely a function of how those things are perceived. The beauty of democracy is that power flows from the people, but the fundamental flaw with democracy relies on these hard truths: What's right is not always popular, and what makes good sense can't always be quickly explained.

It's hard to make the public believe a politician or a movement can do great wonders if their image is subject to laughter and derision. One very public mistake can confirm everyone's suspicions about a politician. Sometimes, the media narrative born out of a gaffe crowds out discussions of bigger issues as cable TV pundits giggle like a group of gossiping teenagers.

The entire process leads to a public deluged with information but lacking in depth of understanding. We don't discuss tax policy, COVID-19 relief, or even health care on a nuts and bolts basis anymore. Even in the best of times, the coverage of proposed policy largely discusses the process of trying to make it pass or fail, and who the winners and losers are of the media cycle. The people are left largely ignorant of what it all means, told to go searching for a website if they want details.

But if a very public mistake occurs, it's almost guaranteed to dominate tweets and cable news, and we find ourselves in the worst of times.

To that end, some mistakes reveal a lot about a person's character and the character of those voters who mark their ballots to support them. After all, we just lived through an election where 74 million people voted for someone with a vast history of awful behavior. There were people who watched that man say things that were demonstrably untrue, defied all logic, and either inspired giggles or shaking heads. And still people—tens of millions of people—viewed it all and said: "He's the guy I want!" There have been all sorts of rationalizations for this, from excuses that labeled every bit of negative coverage as "fake news" to an embrace of the absurd as a pseudo virtue—a stance that defended stupidity as "telling it like it is." That one-term president is proof that to a significant chunk of voters, the mistakes don't matter. Truth and facts don't matter. Instead, reality is skewed by which team a given situation benefits; for some, errors are considered proof of how much someone is "fighting" everything that's supposedly wrong with America.

A spate of recent incidents brings up a larger question of whether gaffes and blunders are as career-ending as they once seemed, especially in a culture where white nationalists have cable TV shows and insurrections are openly embraced by public figures.

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Ted Cruz hurries to return to Texas after his Mexican getaway. Will it matter to voters?

Consider February's debacle of Sen. Ted Cruz's jaunt to a Cancun resort while his Texas constituents were left without power or water during a snowstorm. Cruz booked a hasty return once the trip hit the news, but the story, along with leaked text messages from Cruz's wife, seemed to verify every negative opinion of Cruz long held by his many critics, including some Republicans. To them, it was just another example of how Cruz is a "miserable son of a bitch" who only thinks of himself. Cruz's attempts to do damage control became fodder for late-night shows while Texans picked up the pieces and energy providers attempted to price-gouge them.

The question, of course, is whether it'll make a difference to Cruz's political prospects. Will people care about this very public lapse in judgment by 2024? Did Cruz voters see this and change their minds about him? Or does none of this matter, because Cruz's base will find a way to rationalize his misdeeds?

Not all mistakes are created equal, of course, and what ultimately ends up defining or ending a career is extremely subjective. Some misdeeds waved off as mere gaffes are serious offenses, wrongly dismissed as a "joke." Sometimes a supremely unfair mountain is made out of a merely cringeworthy molehill. The way the media responds matters just as much as how the politicians do, if not more.

The errors themselves usually span the entire spectrum from serious malice or rank stupidity to just plain bad luck. Sometimes there's embarrassment and shame, and sometimes not. For someone like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who seems to offend every other day, one could argue her entire public persona is built on turning into the skid of her gaffes, embracing them as bonafides to the nuts in the Republican base. Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom is now contemplating how to survive a recall after backlash to lockdowns in California coupled with a very bad decision to have dinner at a restaurant even as he was telling his constituents to stay home.


The following are a sampling of major missteps in recent political history. It would take the better part of forever to create an exhaustive list, but all of the examples below are ones where the mistake was used by the media to comment on a person's character, temperament, and judgment. Some of the commentary may have been fair ... and some of the outcomes might have not been.

Al Gore: The internet, 1999

Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore never claimed he "invented the internet," or even came close to implying it. The notion became a favored talking point of pundits during the 2000 presidential election after a March 1999 interview Gore gave to CNN's Wolf Blitzer before Gore had even entered the race. During the interview, Gore was asked to distinguish his record from his rival in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. Gore stated he "took the initiative in creating the internet" as well as other legislative matters while in Congress. In context, the statement was about fostering the internet's development through government support, not Gore himself sitting at a computer typing code.

However, neither context nor defenses from some information technology pioneers who cited Gore's advocacy as important would stop a massive amount of ridicule being dumped on the former vice president during his presidential run. Also, the internet claim was used as part of a media narrative during the 2000 general campaign that painted Gore as less than credible.


Al Gore on creating the internetwww.youtube.com

Howard Dean: The "Dean Scream," 2004

Going into the 2004 primary cycle, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's candidacy seemed ascendant. Dean had been the frontrunner of the Democratic primary field for most of 2003, was strong in both state and national polling, doing well in fundraising, drawing big crowds at events, and had a huge following online. However, the wheels began to come off after Dean finished a disappointing third place in the Iowa Caucus.

During a fiery election night speech where Dean vowed to fight on across every state of the country, he let out a loud scream to excite the crowd.


How to Lose the Presidency: Howard Dean Scream | Night Class | Historywww.youtube.com

The "Dean Scream" instantly became fodder for comedians and late-night talk shows. The pundit class called Dean's performance unpresidential, and played it almost nonstop. Dean's polling lead in New Hampshire evaporated overnight, leading to a 12-point loss to John Kerry. Thirty days after the scream in Iowa had become a meme before we had a word for it, Dean suspended his campaign.

George W. Bush: "Mission Accomplished," 2003, and Hurricane Katrina, 2005

If one looks at the political strength of George W. Bush, it peaked after Sept. 11, 2001, when the country rallied to him in the hope he might actually be a leader. Bush's approval ratings—which hit a baffling 90% two weeks after the terrorist attack —permanently sank below 45% after his handling of Hurricane Katrina. However, in between those two events, there was something else that happened that has become one of the defining political gaffes of the Bush presidency.


Video rewind: Bush's 'Mission Accomplished'www.youtube.com

The Iraq War, and the weaponizing of national security to a political end from Patriot Acts, or turning Gitmo into a dungeon, all the way to questioning the patriotism of Democratic candidates like Sen. Max Cleland (who left two legs in Vietnam for his country) had already shattered whatever solidarity existed among Democrats and Republicans in the wake of 9/11. The legacy of the "Mission Accomplished" speech, and the entire spectacle of Bush in a flight suit landing on an aircraft carrier, becomes even more chilling when it's juxtaposed against the continuing deaths and disorder coming out of Iraq in the latter days of the Bush administration.

Arguably, the turning point in George W. Bush's presidency—at least in its ability to claim the trust of a majority of the public—was Hurricane Katrina. The appearance of a president diddling around on vacation while a major American city was under water, over 1,800 people were dying, and millions were homeless along the Gulf Coast seemed to be the straw that broke the back for many voters. It didn't help that when Bush eventually began to get involved, one of his first soundbites was to tell his FEMA Director Michael Brown, who was working at horse shows before being put in charge of emergency management, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Research done 12 years after Hurricane Katrina found a significant part of Gulf Coast residents still experienced post-traumatic stress symptoms from the incident.

John McCain and Sarah Palin: The financial crisis and that Katie Couric interview, 2008

There is an argument that given the state of the country, George W. Bush's job approval numbers, and the aftereffects of the Iraq War, the 2008 election was destined to be a Democratic year. However, John McCain kept things close in the polls for most of 2008, often outperforming the Republican brand. In fact, at one point McCain held a very small lead in most national polls.

The race was pretty close up until the middle of September, when Barack Obama took a polling lead he would never relinquish. What happened in the middle of September? The stock market and financial services industry went south. It's also around the time people who had 401(k) accounts and investments got statements showing their dwindling nest eggs. This had the effect of putting the economy as the No. 1 issue in the election.

And with the economy going in the shitter, John McCain decided to tell people to believe him, not their lying eyes.


McCain: Fundamentals of Economy Are Strongwww.youtube.com

This statement, when coupled with the stunt of "suspending" his campaign and attempting to postpone the first presidential debate in order to fly back to Washington and deal with an economy that he had just called fundamentally sound, contributed to doubts about McCain's temperament, as well as his ability to deal with a financial crisis.

And if that wasn't enough, voter confidence in John McCain's running mate was dropping like a stone. If one looks at 2008 exit polls, the American public was not impressed by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin: About 60% of voters believed she was unqualified to be president of the United States. Even still, there were a few weeks in 2008 where Palin seemed to offer some wind to McCain's sails. Her performance at the GOP convention, as well as early outings on the campaign trail, seemed to bring conservatives home and give McCain a lead in most polls. All of it collapsed after a gruesome twosome where McCain botched his response to the financial crisis and Palin gave disastrous answers when questioned by the media.

The McCain campaign wouldn't let Palin get near a reporter's microphone for weeks after she was selected. As the media continued to press for access, the McCain campaign ultimately decided to allow a limited number of interviews after trying to prep her and cramming her head full of briefing books. The first interview was with ABC News and Charlie Gibson, where Palin was totally out of her depth, talking about energy independence when asked about her national security credentials and sort of threatening World War III with Russia.

However, the pièce de résistance was the absolutely disastrous interview with Katie Couric for CBS News. Palin just seemed out of her league on every level. Palin couldn't name a newspaper or magazine she had read (or make one up). And her answers were the basis for some of the first skits on Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey. It's bad when SNL uses the transcript of the interview ... word for word.


CNN Laughs It Up Over Sarah Palin Interviewwww.youtube.com

As the public would later find out, the McCain-Palin campaign was an absolute mess behind the scenes. The mistakes that defined the campaign arguably spoke to problems of judgment, whether it was McCain's inability to deal with the economic crisis and to pick a competent running mate, or for Sarah Palin to grow into the opportunity given to her. But it also presaged the slide of the mainstream GOP members towards embracing the kooks in a search for votes.

Donald Trump: The Access Hollywood tape, 2016

Audio of Donald Trump bragging about what was tantamount to sexual assault surfaced two days before the second presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle. The behind-the-scenes footage, captured during a press event with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, featured Trump boasting about his sexual advances to women: Trump claimed that when "you're a star" like himself, women "let you do anything." The footage also included Trump's assertion that he could "grab 'em by the pussy."

Reactions to the tape's existence were overwhelmingly negative from most of the public, but condemnation was not universal, and far more measured from Republican officials. Early speculation that this might be an "October Surprise" that would lead to Trump's withdrawal from the campaign was dashed quickly as a two-prong defense—deflection and rationalization—was employed by the Trump campaign. The tape was dismissed by Trump partisans as "locker room talk," implying it was just two totally normal dudes boasting about sexual conquests. When that didn't work, Trump fell back on whataboutism, arguing that others, including Hillary and Bill Clinton, had done or excused worse.

While Trump did go on to barely win the election against Hillary Clinton, an academic study of the tape's effect on the 2016 race does claim the incident diminished Trump's support. However, former campaign officials like Steve Bannon—who advised Donald Trump to "double down"—believe American voters "don't care" about it and had "no lasting impact."


Steve Bannon: Trump's "Access Hollywood" tape was a "litmus test"www.youtube.com

In the runup to the 2020 election, there were various think pieces written with concern about a Joe Biden candidacy, citing his history of gaffes. However, even beyond the above examples, several analyses of the effect of gaffes in campaigns tend to believe such stumbles' ability to move the needle with the public is overstated. Nate Silver's reading of polling found that Mitt Romney's "47%" comments during the 2012 campaign may have only moved 1% of voters towards President Barack Obama. According to Silver, the focus on mistakes and gaffes is fueled by the news media, which needs something exciting for its stories, especially when covering campaigns and feeding a constant need for content. For example, one of the most replayed clips of a presidential candidate making a mistake in a debate is that of Gerald Ford stating there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the 1976 campaign. Ford's flub is usually positioned in service of the public image of Ford as a dumb lightweight who was not up to being president; combined with the debate mistake, it may have been crucial in his defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter. However, Ford actually gained in the polls after that debate.

Furthermore, it's been asserted that if a focus on gaffes serves any useful purpose for the opposition, it helps confirm negative attitudes about a person among the people already predisposed to dislike them, and charges up the opponent's base to help their turnout rather than converting one's own voters to change their minds. So while Hillary Clinton calling Trump voters a "basket of deplorables" is hyped by media pundits as a reason Clinton didn't do well in the Rust Belt back in 2016, it's more likely that the people who are offended by such a thing were probably never going to vote for her anyway. Amid the 2012 campaign, President Obama stated during a press conference that "the private sector is doing fine." The media decided Obama had made a major gaffe that was a "gift" to the Republicans. Despite all the hyperventilating by pundits, Obama's comment barely affected his job approval numbers.

But is it really accurate to say that gaffes don't matter?

We, as voters, define candidates not only by where they stand on issues, but by the images and words we believe reveal something about their inner character. What we focus on is also based on our own biases, whether those moments are arguably relevant or not. Moreover, in the present environment, where the response to negative coverage, at least among a significant chunk of the electorate, is to scream "fake news," a gaffe's power to drive voters to the polls is more an exercise in stoking one's own side to action than a path to conversion of new supporters.

I would argue the full impact of these blunder stories is not easily understood, and there are indirect effects that are not considered when a full-blown media focus on a screw-up occurs. The biggest problem is how much time and focus gets wasted away. Want to talk about health care? Want to discuss the pandemic response? Too bad, because the next couple of days are going to be spent doing damage control. Once the press frenzy dies down it's not over, since every new story gets filtered through the new narrative.

Does anyone really believe Ted Cruz will ever be taken seriously talking about bipartisanship or the importance of government services providing support to citizens? When Cruz addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in late February, he did so at a time where less than half of Texas Republicans viewed Cruz favorably and his job approval numbers had slipped underwater with all voters. Every time he runs for anything in the future, the video of him looking like a schlub with a suitcase in a Mexican airport will be run, and run again. Such gaffes may not be the main reason candidates lose or careers are destroyed, but they do explain how some of the oxygen of policy debates gets sucked from the room. Yet at CPAC, Cruz took the Bannon approach: He doubled down and didn't apologize or address the fiasco—other than to make a bad joke of it. Instead, Cruz leaned on a laundry list of boogeymen and fearmongering, from the supposed tyranny of mask mandates to minimizing the insurrection at the Capitol.

The sad truth is that Cruz, Taylor Greene, and all Republicans know that while gaffes, mistakes, and errors might animate Democrats, the same people who censured officials for not showing enough support to Donald Trump don't want apologies, or the sort of moments that satiate media pundits. They want defiance, and reward their officials for going against the norms. But those same voters will raise holy hell and get motivated into getting signatures for a recall in California over pictures of the governor making a selfish mistake. To that base, a stumble on a staircase leading to Air Force One becomes a point of obsession that proves every right-wingbacked armchair non-doctor's conspiracy theories about Joe Biden's fitness. Gaffes matter to those voters, but only the ones they think should matter. Therefore, the ability for a gaffe or mistake to ever convert a Republican voter to change their view of a candidate or official is limited. The only ones we can probably hold out hope for are those with an open mind.

Gaffes, of course, have tremendous power to shape both popular culture and our memories, lingering long after a campaign is over. Which political gaffes, blunders, and mistakes have stuck with you?

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The fears we laugh about during Halloween say a lot about our politics

"Blessed be our new founding fathers and America ... A nation reborn."

This year will see us celebrating a very different Halloween. In many places around the country, children will not be able to go trick-or-treating, and adults will not be able to dress up and make fools of themselves at the club, given the current pandemic. But what is Halloween without a scary story? And what is the nature of those spooky tales? Most of the time they are rooted in very real issues and very real threats.

Sometimes the scariest thing in movies or books is not the killer, monster, or demon jumping out of the dark. Some of the best works scare people with what they can get the viewer or reader to imagine to be behind the creaking door, without ever spelling out what was really there, or even if there was really anything to be scared of in the first place. For a little kid, what lurks underneath their bed is anything the fear of their mind can imagine.

The best horror stories bring people back to that childhood innocence and then exploit it. But this is also true of those adult fears, which the most manipulative use for untoward ends.

Without even getting into arguments over aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot, chupacabras, green children, the Loch Ness monster, or even who killed Jimmy Hoffa, there are more down-to-earth real mysteries and monsters which are just as chilling and unnerving. The Trump administration has been likened to Pennywise the Dancing Clown of Stephen King's It, an entity which feeds on human fears while making targets of the vulnerable and exacerbating the overall negative emotions of everyone in the community. In this respect, the great and terrible darkness we fight is not lurking to get at us from another dimension or to escape a hell below us. It's right here with us, staring back in any mirror. The sad thing is these monsters are not just things which scurry about in the dark. The monsters of today stand in broad daylight wearing suits with flag lapel pins. These demons prey on children and the weak to gain their power. They have a cult of followers, some of which may be our own family members, united in fear and worship of their leaders' every lie. The evil which lurks corrupts everything it touches and foments violence against anyone that disagrees.

Author C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist who worked his faith into many of his works, believed the problem of evil was not the conflict between two separate and equal entities, but what humans classify as evil only exists as only a dark reflection of that which is good. To Lewis, the natural state of the universe is perfection, since it was created by a perfect God, who passed on that perfection—until humans screwed things up with original sin. Therefore, any evil which exists is only a corruption of a society's norms and a person's integrity, and not an innate aspect of either the community or individuals.

Sometimes it's the individual or societal anxieties which express very real fear-causing aspects of life, albeit in grossly exaggerated ways. This notion becomes important when looking at the ideas and morality which have been part of scary stories and horror tales for centuries, and which still reverberate to this day.

People who have premarital sex and do drugs deserve to die

My mother's next-door neighbor is someone I could call at three in the morning and he'd be there to help. When my mother was rushed to the hospital in the back of an ambulance and we had no way to get back home, he answered his phone in the middle of the night. However, this neighbor is also one of the most politically conservative people I've ever met. I vividly remember him talking about his opposition to birth control and abortion, which were based in his belief there must be "consequences" for sex. If social conservatism has been defined by a fear of one's own body, then the end point for socially conservative policies is punishment as the wages of sin for anyone who chooses agency over their own person.

This sort of right-wing idea of punishing sin is a very common trope in many horror films. Who do Jason Voorhees and his mother kill in Friday the 13th? Their victims tend to be a lot of teenagers who decided it was a good idea to have sex in a tent next to a lake known for an undead killer in a hockey mask. Of course, being too dumb to live is also an acceptable excuse for characters in a horror movie to die.

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All of this leads to an argument that the horror genre is actually "innately conservative, even reactionary" in ideology. The essence of fear as a tool to elicit an emotional response aims to reestablish our feelings of essential normality in relation to the threat of change, whether that change be a fear of death or even radical social change. That's why even though scary movies have more than enough violence and bare breasts to make most moral guardians clutch their pearls, most also have a fundamental morality which allows the audience to accept the enjoyment of watching horrible things happen to those people who break certain rules—since many of those rules align with the aims of Focus on the Family and other conservative assholes.

The fairy tale we know as Little Red Riding Hood is derived from two sources—Charles Perrault (also known as Mother Goose) and the Brothers Grimm. However, the story is much older than either of them, and like a lot of well-known fairy tales, the original iteration of the story is quite gruesome. The Big Bad Wolf actually feeds the grandmother to a naive Little Red Riding Hood, then gets her to disrobe and get in bed with him. In the Brothers Grimm version, the girl and her grandmother were rescued by a passing hunter, and then proceeded to fill the Wolf's belly with stones.

But it is Perrault's version that's noted for removing darker elements like cannibalism and adding the "red hood," which takes on some symbolic significance, since there is no happy ending for his Little Red Riding Hood. The Wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood ... the end. Perrault intended the story to be a moral to young women about all wolves who deceive. The redness of the hood has been interpreted as a symbolic representation of sexual awakening and lust.

Variations of almost every element of Little Red Riding Hood appear in modern horror movies. The Big Bad Wolf is the archetypal "slasher" villain; a predator who shows almost, or true, supernatural abilities to deceive and manipulate his victims, most of whom are almost always women. Throw in Perrault's sexual symbolism, and you have the virginal "final girl" of many horror movies.

The heroine is a white virginal girl

The term "final girl" was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film. The book analyzed the slasher genre from a feminist perspective, and Clover argues that, instead of being driven by misogyny and sadism against women, these movies put the male viewer into the mindset of the female protagonist, or "the final girl" to survive. The final girl can scream, cry, and show fear in a way which audiences wouldn't accept from a male character. The final girl usually has a unisex name (e.g., Ripley, Sam, or Jay, in the case of It Follows), and tends to be portrayed as an idealization of female innocence and purity. She's probably not sexually experienced, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't do drugs and more likely than not is a bit of a "Mary Sue." The character may be based on conservative attitudes and ideas of what women "should be." On the other hand, the final girl is usually separated emotionally from her parents, and the horror of the story tends to be connected to the sins of the parents, which is hidden behind a facade of family values.

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Many have argued this trope takes advantage of regressive sexual attitudes in pop culture, where an apprehension to sex is coupled with the audience being titillated by sadism against a female protagonist and female characters. Beyond just horror movies, depicting a woman with sexual agency is still problematic in both fiction and real-life. There's a "virgin whore" dichotomy that Freud would have a field day with, where the culture sexualizes women, but if those women actually enjoy sex, it's either ridiculed (i.e., slut-shaming) or seen as something wrong or weird.

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The other side of the argument is that many of the horror movies which came out of the 1970s "exploitation" film era are some of the first movies to have strong female characters that weren't dependent on men to "save" them. This argument is also found in discussions of Blaxploitation films, where the trade off to having Black actors and actresses front and center meant seeing them typecast as gangsters, hookers, and pimps.

"Even in the mid-'70s, the kind of proto-feminist element was being written about," said Kathleen McHugh, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. "Feminist film scholars were writing about Roger Corman and Stephanie Rothman, locating a feminist impulse in the standard plot, where you have these powerful, self-assertive, one might even use the term 'extremely aggressive' women who are wreaking vengeance against forces, people, men who are trying to keep them down."

The Black guy dies first

Apparently all evil monsters, aliens, and serial killers are racists, since people of color hardly ever survive a horror movie, and usually are among the first to die. On the one hand, this ties in to an argument about diversity both in front of and behind the camera in Hollywood. As it became more important for movies and television shows to increase representation and not pretend every community only has white people, more people of color appeared in front of the camera. However, the space behind the camera was, and to some extent still is, dominated by white writers and mostly white people in production. Writers tend to write what they know, and if given a character with a background they don't know or haven't really experienced, it may lead to either a cliche storm of stereotypes or killing the character off to get them out of the way once they're onscreen for a few minutes, long enough to get bonafides for diverse casting. And so Black characters—just as Black people in real life, sadly—become accessories to be used and discarded in service of white characters' needs.

Black people rarely make it to the end of a horror movie, but it's not exactly true that they always die first.

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Over the past few decades, this notion has further been subverted, especially as more people of color are producing and directing their own material. More films in the horror genre have put issues of race and class front and center, with the horror of the movies shifted. Instead of the story being in service to the wants of white people, as it was in many past films with token characters, the struggle of these films switches the perspective where the horror is the wants of white people.

Jordan Peele's Get Out is a "social thriller," in which the horror scenario is a way for the story to expound into a damning satire about objectification and exploitation of Black people and Black culture, while assailing a type of white liberal guilt that talks a good game but does nothing to change anything. Peele's second film, Us, bases its action around a family being terrorized by violent doppelgängers attempting to take their place. The film is just as full of subtext as Get Out, but this time it's a contemplation about the nature of how we define ourselves as persons, and the ways it spirals out into the lies we want to believe about societies.

The Purge series was originally written off as nothing more than schlock, but each installment has made the themes of social inequality more explicit. Set in a future where a right-wing party called the New Founding Fathers of America has instituted an annual holiday where all crimes are legal for one night, under the claim of purging negative emotions, the propaganda of the regime claims instituting the event has resulted in 1% unemployment and an "America reborn." In actuality, the purge is intended as a legalized form of mass murder, in which the poor and other undesirable elements of society are eliminated through death squads, and the purge itself is a metaphor for the destruction done by the social inequalities created by poverty. In The Purge films, the wealthy are able to protect themselves or take part in the holiday with a degree of safety, while the poor are preyed upon by racists and elements of government who have judged them to be burdens or non-human. The Purge thus becomes a story for how people will rationalize abandoning the unfortunate if given only a perception of fairness, even when the result is not—reminiscent of the elevation of the idea that the free market fairly picks the "winners" and "losers," without allowing for the idea that hundreds of years of bias and discrimination plays a part.

Catholics are the only ones capable of fighting demons

Religious horror basically takes the Cliffs Notes version and various apocrypha of major religions and turns it into a scary story. In any horror movie, if it comes time to battle the forces of darkness and there is a possibility of defeating the evil by some vestiges of religion, the means by which it will be defeated will probably be quasi-Catholic. So thanks a lot for nothing, Martin Luther and the rest of you Protestants! The reason is because the Catholic Church is old and has a history of ornate ritual and majestic symbolism. Plus, cursing out a demon in Latin just sounds cooler.

Both Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist use the concept of the Devil and demons to inspire fear. But at their core, they're really movies about the female condition, within a religious framework. In both films, women are in situations where their pleas for help are either subverted or not taken seriously. And in both movies, the male figures either betray them, are absent, or are emotionally detached from offering any comfort.

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Rosemary's Baby connects to real fears that women have during pregnancy: the possibility that something is wrong with their baby, that they're losing control of their body, and the situation is one they have little control over. The movie just adds in Satanic rape and devil worshipers.

The true horror of The Exorcist exists whether one believes in demonic possession, since the crux of the story is really about helplessness and a mother's fear of having something wrong with a child that no one seems able to fix. In this respect, whether it's mental illness, cancer, or a demon, the story connects on that emotional level.

The key to surviving any horror scenario is friendship and a family's love

1982's Poltergeist is now considered a classic of this particular genre. And that's interesting for a number of reasons, given some of the controversy and trivia which surrounds the movie. Poltergeist is a great example of a theme usually associated with Steven Spielberg's movies from the late '70s to the mid-'80s (i.e., suburban, middle-class families dealing with extraordinary circumstances). One of the knocks usually levied against Spielberg is he idealizes American suburbia and visualizes it in a nostalgic tone. That's not exactly true. In E.T. and Poltergeist, both families have flaws. Spielberg's suburban life is one in which unsupervised children stay up all hours watching TV, eating junk food, surrounded by products and things which provide no meaning, while living in cookie cutter neighborhoods. But if Spielberg sentimentalized anything, he idealizes the ability of a family's love to overcome all obstacles.

Teamwork makes the dream work and, like a dysfunctional family, this is especially true for any disparate group of people thrown together in a crisis. The George Romero Living Dead films touch on race, gender, and the inability of people to work together at the end of the world, which is just as true when expanded out to societies which can't work together to combat climate change, systemic racism, health care, or pandemics.

The zombie apocalypse is a situation that brings out the worst tendencies in humans, and turns our best qualities against us. In order to survive, a balance has to be found between the two. With almost any zombie film, they can be seen in such an entirely different light when you realize the zombies aren't meant to be evil—or even the villains. The zombies are no different than a thunderstorm, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. It's just a part of nature that we deal with, and how we deal with it can sometimes depend on what kind of person we are. Therefore, the true evil in most zombie apocalypses is humanity. With the world crumbling around them, the human characters still can't put aside their differences (whether race, class or ego) to save each other. The survivors would rather fight over the last scraps of civilization, or hold on to prejudices that serve to help no one survive.

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Don't turn off the main road for a shortcut

Among one of the most disturbing documentaries PBS ever broadcast is The Donner Party, which focuses on the infamous incident in which a disastrous expedition of settlers to California resulted in starvation, murder, and cannibalism.

Director Ric Burns, whose brother is Ken Burns (The Civil War), uses historical stills, nature photography, and celebrity voice overs to create a truly unsettling tale. Just as in The Civil War, David McCullough narrates, with readings from the actual diary entries of the Donner settlers providing the details of what happened as the situation went from bad to worse. McCullough's narration is particularly effective. The way McCullough nonchalantly mentions a wife having to watch her dead husband's heart being roasted on a stick catches the viewer off-guard. And with the use of still photography, what one doesn't see becomes more troubling, since the mind fills in the gaps in ways that are more horrific.

Many very common horror movie tropes occurred over the course of the Donner Party's journey. Hell, it might be the source of some of the cliches: people deciding to turn off the main road to take a shortcut that turns out to be the worst choice of their lives, an arrogant member of the group's behavior making a bad situation worse, disintegration of relationships through greed and ego, and ending most gruesomely with blood and gore through cannibalism.

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What could possibly go wrong?

A hunger to know things is a common theme in literature and mythology, but it's been balanced over thousands of years with messages that the pursuit of knowledge may destroy paradise. Curiosity is frequently treated as something of a sin; the pursuit of knowledge and the discovery of truth usually signify the loss of innocence. The Holy Bible uses this trope with the temptation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And Greek mythology has both Pandora and her box and Prometheus and his gift of fire. Reams could and probably have been written on the effect on Western civilization due to two big cultural myths which blamed women for bringing evil and suffering into the world, and how that corresponds to ideas about sexual innocence and moral purity.

In a good portion of scary movies that touch on science fiction, there is more than a fair share of Luddite tendencies. Even though science fiction deals with possibilities and all the wonder that may be, it also has a habit of tempering that with a lot of paranoia and suspicion of advanced technology, scientific discovery, and its application. To this end, most stories posit corporations and government as the "Big Bads," since their depictions tend to be neither benevolent nor trustworthy enough to deal with knowledge that might be gained, due to ulterior motives of greed and power.

As a child, I learned some important lessons. If I should ever come across a crashed meteor, and ooze should slither out of it, I should run the hell away instead of poking it with a stick. If I am ever part of an experiment, any positive physical changes will be temporary; I will ultimately descend into becoming a monstrous mass of flesh. And if someday a flying saucer is discovered under the ice of Antarctica, don't thaw it, as it will end with teeth growing out of the chest and one's head growing tentacles.

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Killers struggle with sexual identity

Until the mid-1970s, both the American psychiatric and psychological associations classified homosexuality as a mental health disorder and listed it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This particular bias is prevalent in many, many stories where gay and transgender characters are shown enduring a life of self-hating sadness, suffering from an addiction to supposedly aberrant behavior, or drawn to an underworld of sin. And since people with these "unnatural" compulsions are broken, LGBTQ characters have been used, sometimes as the twist, in a lot of murder-mysteries, psychological dramas, and horror movies.

Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer plays the monster angle literally, where a gay character is chased through the streets like Frankenstein's monster and killed. Along the same lines, the implied or explicit homosexuality of the killer is often a twist of the "thriller" genre. The adaptation of Roderick Thorp's The Detective, starring Frank Sinatra, has the killer at one point saying he "felt more guilty about being a homosexual than being a murderer" and skulking around the streets looking to pick up men, like an addict searching for a fix. William Friedkin's Cruising, which follows an undercover cop investigating a serial killer targeting gay men within New York's leather/BDSM scene, was protested during its production and upon release by gay rights activists who believed the film characterized homosexuals as promiscuous and violent. Similar to the most problematic issues surrounding Cruising, 1992's Basic Instinct was protested by LGBTQ activists for presenting gay people and bisexuals in a negative light; some protesters stood outside theaters holding signs that revealed the identity of the movie's killer. One of the most controversial aspects of both the novel and Jonathan Demme's adaption of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs was the characterization of serial killer Buffalo Bill.

It's fascinating how this characterization has changed over the years. The change in these views of the LGBTQ community has led many to feel that positive depictions of gay men and lesbian women in film and television have been important in pushing the public to a more tolerant position.

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We live in The Twilight Zone

As I've gotten older, I've come to realize a lot of my love for science fiction and horror material can be seen through the prism of cathartic wish fulfillment and a release of all the things we're afraid of within an engaging story.

Because "in a better world," we can do anything. In some far-off future society, things make sense. Unlike in the here and now, problems can be solved with reason and science, no one looks down their nose at others for being different, and the worst mistakes can be made right again. Brave heroes boldly charge through the darkness in great machines to save the day. While there will be struggles and suffering, and dark threats must be confronted, even death itself can be opposed. And through it all, maybe there's even a fatherly figure who dispenses wisdom and lessons of morality in between drags on his cigarette.

One of the greatest powers of story can be its ability to divorce a controversial topic from all of the usual bullshit that surrounds it, forcing the reader/viewer to examine a topic in a new way. It allows the public conscious for confronting humanity's hopes and despairs, fears and failings, prejudices and atrocities in allegory and metaphor. So it should be no surprise that scary stories reflect who we are as a people, both good and bad.

The horror films of the last two decades have seen an increased diversity in topics and formats, which are themselves reactions to cultural shifts. Found footage films arose at the same time that selfies and social media became commonplace. A glut of horror movie remakes, and remakes in general, have occurred during the same era where a significant part of the populace has clung to old ideas and want to make flawed, past memories great again instead of creating better and newer ones. What does the future hold? How will the influence of the Trump era be expressed in future scary movies?

Only time will tell.

If Trump loses refuses to concede, we need to take to the streets. The Protect the Results coalition has been preparing for this by organizing hundreds of post-election events across the country. Click here to find, and RSVP for, the Count Every Vote rally near you.

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Here's what it's like to go on a conservative dating app

Conventional wisdom holds a relationship is based upon common interests. The general course of most couplings involves going out on dates where people have to find interesting things to discuss, through continued interactions it builds intimacy, trust, and closeness, and hopefully good sex, commitment and love comes afterwards. But common interests doesn’t always mean sameness. Some of the most boring conversations in the world can be where someone just repeats: “Yes, me too.” For some, the most attractive quality in a partner is to have someone who’s different and challenges what one thinks.

The answer is that they look mostly like every other dating app, just with shittier functionality, fewer people, and more selfies of men posing with assault rifles.

Similar to how cable and streaming have fragmented the viewing audience into hundreds of different channels and online options, the market for dating help has become just as segmented. Match.com, Tinder, eHarmony, and OkCupid go after everyone and allow the user to filter out and pare things down by swiping left or right; Farmersonly.com, JDate, and BlackPeopleMeet.com targeting people based on lifestyle, racial, and ethnic demographics that some people find the most important aspect in an intimate partner. And there are a whole host of reasons people reject others. Bumble introduced a filtering feature that allows its users to reject potential matches based on their astrological sign. But the rise of dating options based on personal ideology is a reflection of both segmented marketing and the polarization of the public in a time of political strife.

Recent polling found 45% of Democrats saying they would be unhappy if their child married a Republican, while 35% percent of Republicans felt they would be unhappy if their child married a Democrat. Compare this to 1960, when only 4% of Republicans and Democrats said they would be displeased if their son or daughter married someone of the opposite party. A survey of its users by OkCupid in 2017 found that 83% thought how someone feels about Donald Trump was important, and 74% felt that support of Donald Trump was a dealbreaker in dating. This has led to conservatives claiming they’re being discriminated against.

In recent years, a crop of conservative dating startups have launched in response to this phenomenon, all with one purpose: giving right-wingers a safe space to find love. Some, like Righter and Conservatives Only, are only for, well, conservatives. Others, like Donald Daters — tagline: Make America Date Again — claim they’re open to people of all political stripes who are interested in dating Republicans … Some of the people behind these conservative apps think liberals who refuse to date conservatives are doing something more destructive than looking for partners who share their values. To them, it amounts to anti-conservative discrimination.

Emily Moreno, the founder of Donald Daters, told me she once had a date walk out on her “before the drinks had even arrived” after she said she had worked on a Republican Senate campaign — and that was before Trump got elected.

“I continue to hear these stories from my friends about how when they’re on these standard dating apps, they’re always told they won’t get a first date. It’s right there in the bio,” she said, referring to the seemingly ubiquitous “Trump supporters swipe left.”

Among the options for lonely partisans looking for love:

  • Trump.Dating, DonaldDaters, and TrumpSingles.com are all advertised explicitly to Cult 45 members, with slogans such as “Make America Date Again.” TrumpSingles.com claims more than 45,000 members. Trump.Dating wants people who are seeking to "deport liberals from your love life." It also excludes any possible gay conservatives out there by making the only choices for registration “straight woman” and “straight man.” The site also gets weirdly specific about European identity, with “Scandinavian/Mediterranean/Eastern European/Western European” being thrown around as possible backgrounds.
  • ConservativesOnly.com was started during the Obama administration as “the ultimate dating and friend finder for like-minded people.” The right-wing app Patrio was started for “conservative, patriotic singles.”
  • For a time, there was a Bernie Singles site, which had slogans such as "Meet other people who understand the world" and "The 1 percent aren't the only ones getting screwed this election season." The site seems to have gone bye-bye, but there is a new beta.
Even eHarmony, which was once known as a more conservative Christian-oriented site, has become more mainstream in recent years. It has the same number of Christian users as non-Christian users, according to its chief executive officer, Grant Langston. But like OkCupid, eHarmony has seen the number of users willing to date people of other political stripes shrink dramatically.

“I think there is some debate as to whether it is even possible, now, to mix people who are passionate about politics and on different sides of the fence,” he said. “Over the last year, our users have gone to great lengths to call out their political stripes in their profiles, and they are doing that as a way of saying, ‘If you don’t agree with me, let’s not communicate.’ So, putting people into one large pool may not be doing much to break down walls among the politically dedicated.”

One of the newest of these dating apps/sites appealing to conservatives is Righter. Founded by Christy Edwards Lawton, after she claimed to have met a “beautiful” woman at a Republican fundraiser in Manhattan who stated that the only men who wanted her were those who wanted her for sex, and that being a conservative was a detriment to finding someone who wanted a relationship. Lawton also states that the Righter app was launched after research into Tinder profiles in which, from sea to shining sea, there were messages saying, “Trump voters swipe left.”

Righter is specifically intended to be used only by conservatives, to the point that Lawton has threatened to sue any liberals who use the service when it launched late last year, while also marketing Righter with a stream of offensive messages meant to appeal to the people who’ve spent the past four years supporting offensive things and people.

Christy Edwards Lawton: “So the principle of the [Righter] app was always conservative principles. What was just interesting, after Donald Trump got elected, was the toxic environment that we were in … I think it started with TV; I think porno being so accessible on your phone, that definitely helped. I think that the apps, the dating apps, Tinder, definitely escalated it and made it so easy. But again, I have to say here, there is a responsibility on women: Close your legs, please. Here’s the issue: If men can get it that easily, and if you’re repeatedly giving it to them that easily, it’s supply and demand. Guys, this is economics 101. Sexonomics … Not on any level would I raise my daughter as a feminist.”

I decided to risk the wrath of Lawton’s legal team and created a profile on Righter to see what one could expect from a dating app based on conservative principles.

The first thing that’s apparent is the binary choices. Like some of the Trump dating apps/sites discussed above, the gender choices are limited to male or female. And once you are in the app, the possible matches for a user are limited to only those of the opposite sex.

Sorry, Mary Cheney and gay Republicans! Y’all don’t exist in conservative principles world!

Another thing that becomes clear is that conservative dating apps such as Righter are basically just like the normal dating apps, just shittier. The people one sees in the app seem like the types of people one sees in ordinary dating, except there there’s a lot of talk about Jesus, guns, and taxes being theft. However, if there’s an audience of neglected conservatives needing love, it’s a very small one.

I used the app in a pretty conservative area of the country, where one would think Righter’s bread-and-butter user base would come from. There were only a handful of matches nearby, and most of the matches were hundreds of miles away.

Beyond the limited amount of fellow conservative assholes to pick from, there are issues with functionality. The app is not the most intuitive thing to use. Although one can increase functionality and make things less shitty by paying $9.99/month. I declined the offer.

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From Sarah Palin to John Edwards, here are 25 of the dumbest things said by politicians or media talking heads

In modern politics, the very nature of trying to debate objective reality has become a multiple-choice game between differing ideologies and self-interests, wherein facts which are suspect and patently absurd are given equal time. The rationalization of deceit has given way to prettier terms like “spin.” Being a racist asshole is treated by dumb pundits as the musings of “firebrands.” Normalizing bigotry under the banner of “religious freedom” is treated as something to be understood in some circles, instead of something to be defeated. Because, in the middle of it all, the conversation is controlled by a news media which too often is afraid to call a lie a lie, and puppets those lies as just another viewpoint while trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility for spreading it far and wide.

Here’s a scene which hits a little too close to home from the just-ended Veep, depicting the future 49th vice president of the United States, Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons):



The criteria for what qualifies as a "screw up" can be very subjective, but I would posit it’s any action or event said or done by a politician, a campaign, interest group, or media personality which:

  • Seriously contributed to a politician or party losing an election, or a journalist or pundit losing their job.
  • Seriously damaged a person's ability to move upward and onward in politics, on television, or to be read and taken seriously on the internet or print.
  • Damaged the public image of a person, their political party, the institution they work for, or the ideology they advocate.

The sad part is there have been people who have said and done some really stupid, gross, objectionable things and have never been held to account for it. Some are even president right now.

This is because not all gaffes and mistakes are created equal. It can be argued that some are fair, and some aren't. And most of them are creations of media perceptions, or tactics that backfire spectacularly. Mistakes and gaffes usually come from malice, stupidity, or just plain bad luck. And the difference can be in the spinning at making mountains out of molehills.

The statements made by politicians run the gamut from ignorant and stupid to vile. Some even make one question whether representative democracy really is the best form of government we could have.

  • “He said that he agreed with what Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearing, in which he said it was settled law.”
    • —Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), explaining why she thinks now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will not threaten Roe v. Wade
  • “First of all, it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer.”
    • —Former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), attempting to mitigate his infidelity and having a child with his mistress and campaign staffer, which came to light during the 2008 campaign as his wife was dying from cancer
  • “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.”
    • —Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), responding with his infamous “man on dog” answer to a question of whether homosexuality should be outlawed
  • “The internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
    • —Former Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK), explaining the workings of the internet during a debate on net neutrality
  • ''Well, let's see. There's — of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but —''
    • —Former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AL), unable to name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with other than Roe v. Wade, during an infamous interview with Katie Couric
  • “(I have) a wide stance.”
    • —Former Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), explaining to his arresting officer why he was playing footsie in a Minneapolis airport bathroom
  • “I do not support a livable wage.”
      • —Congresswoman Karen Handel (R-GA), explaining her opposition to raising the minimum wage

    

  • “Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth ...There isn't one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle … And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the Earth.”
    • —Former Congresswoman (and idiot) Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), explaining her opposition to measures meant to combat climate change
  • "His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being—you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it."
    • —Donald Trump, arguing it was possible Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was the second gunman on the grassy knoll​​​​​​​
  • "I think incest can be handled as a family matter within the family. The people know about it and they can get more serious about it. But I don't think it's rape because of the awareness of it within the family."
  • “But one of the things I’ve talked to the secretary of agriculture about: Why don’t you have the kids pay a dime, pay a nickel to instill in them that there is, in fact, no such thing as a free lunch? Or maybe sweep the floor of the cafeteria — and yes, I understand that that would be an administrative problem, and I understand that it would probably lose you money. But think what we would gain as a society in getting people—getting the myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch.”
    • ​​​​​​​—Former Congressman (and current TV pundit) Jack Kingston (R-GA), explaining why poor kids have it too good getting a government-provided meal
  • “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
    • —Former Congressman Todd Akin, defending his position of no abortion exceptions on the grounds of rape by claiming women who are truly raped don’t get pregnant
  • “We will never be able to win in the clash of civilizations if we don’t know who we are. If Western civilization succumbs to the siren song of multiculturalism, I believe we are finished.”
    • —Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), expressing white nationalist sentiments which have become much more (visibly) popular within the Republican party since his failed presidential campaign​​​​​​​
  • “Some of them are valedictorians—and their parents brought them in. It wasn't their fault. It's true in some cases, but they aren't all valedictorians. They weren't all brought in by their parents. For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” ​​​​​

For the last half-century, the news media has done and said things of equal stupidity at varying times. Any criticism of their divine right to crack dumb in between reading off a teleprompter invariably engenders a response wherein pundits wrap themselves in the flag, use the First Amendment as a shield, and argue the nobility of purpose in screaming “but her emails!” while occasionally giving free airtime to a megalomaniacal fool.

Among some of the dumbest things said by pundits and media personalities, and just remember all of these people are paid thousands, if not millions, for their insights and analysis:

  • “No objective evidence Empire was ‘evil.’ A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit.”
  • “My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.”
  • “I didn't hear the president demean women when he was running for president. Didn’t hear it.”
  • "If you've ever seen the X-Men movies, you know they're about a group of mutants who are the next wave of human evolution. They've got special powers, and if left unchecked they will eventually wipe out humanity as we know it. That's how I feel about Mormons."
  • “I’m still on my parents’ health insurance.”
      • —Tomi Lahren, said by the then 24-year-old conservative Fox News contributor moments after criticizing Obamacare, which is what enabled her to remain on her parents’ health insurance until she’s 26.

  • “Now look, I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. Well—I'm not saying that he—I'm not not saying that either. God— what God does is God's business, I have no idea. But I'll tell you this: whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus—there's a message being sent. And that is, "Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it." I'm just sayin'.”
    • —Glenn Beck, trying to say what he wants to say without sounding like he’s saying it, because on some level he knows how batshit nuts he sounds​​​​​​​ saying it
  • “You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, so long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.”
  • “Sometimes in life you just have to keep walking ... Some things in life need to be mysterious.”
  • “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama … I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Rev. Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.”
  • “How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don't know, marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors or your co-workers if you can't understand each other or share no common values?”
    • —Tucker Carlson, revealing how insular and limited his life must have been to this point, since I get along with my neighbors because they’re kind people, not because of what color they are or the God they worship
  • “To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.”
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Why conservative ideology is based in the belief white people are the true victims in American society

Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities has been called “the quintessential novel of the 80s” in satirizing the racial and class politics of New York City during the era, which saw the city severely divided after multiple incidents where white and black people had different perspectives about what was right and what was wrong. The novel, which depicts a clusterfuck of awful people using a car accident involving a wealthy, white bond trader and a young African-American in the Bronx to advance their various agendas, both hits upon ideas about white fears of being around black people and the exploitation of that racism for wealth and fame.

At least at present, Smollet maintains his story. But as the scrutiny about Smollet’s story has increased, the number of cracks in his version of events has become bigger and bigger as unnamed sources and rumors have dominated the news. Conservative media has latched onto this incident as an example of “fake news,” reporters and activists jumping to conclusions because of a bias against everything Trump, and a reason why Republicans will not believe reports of Trump’s lies and abuses. Similar to how some conservatives interpret the meaning of Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities as being about a “palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial” to answer for cultural sins, it is now a certainty within right-wing circles that Smollet’s allegations are not only not true, but evidence which discounts all allegations of this sort. Because, as we all know, truth and the facts have mattered so much to conservatives over the years.

Let’s accept as a given there’s something to be said in examining evidence before believing every story, and that if Smollet is lying his actions are both deeply repugnant and extremely damaging to other victims. Maybe this should give the media and blogs pause in drawing broad conclusions about what things mean until some facts are known and established, since it only hands ammunition to these pricks if the story turns out to have holes.

However, let’s also examine this hypocritical bullshit for what it’s worth.



As Doctor House said: “Everybody lies.” The extent and severity of those lies among individuals, and the context in which they’re told, distinguish them. Lies which waste resources that could be used for real crimes, make it harder for real victims to be believed, and done for someone's own personal aggrandizement should be sharply condemned and severely punished.

However, just because there are more than enough lies to go around, and too many horrible people telling them, doesn’t invalidate the concept of objective truth or mean the issues which surround them are imvalidated. It does not mean because one can point at mistakes, silly demagogues, and awful charlatans that reality becomes whatever one wants to believe it is and there are no real victims

Beyond this basic common sense there’s the fact this criticism and rationalizing might have more weight if it wasn’t coming from a group of lying hypocrites. The same people who claim to be the victims of bias and half-truths are the one who put their faith in a liar as their champion. And not only a simple liar: a liar who lies about everything every day, that they then lie to protect.

EVERY. GODDAMN. DAY.

From Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

From their point of view … It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.

That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.

To non-conservatives, this sounds absurd. White men are the country’s most powerful and privileged citizens. The party they dominate currently controls two and a half branches of government, and they sit in a disproportionate number of powerful seats in the private sector. But in this argument, conservatives follow a maxim generally attributed to the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” By this, Breitbart meant that the balance of power in day-to-day politics is determined, in the long run, by the cultural ideas that shape the way people approach politics.

With liberal elites largely in charge of the country’s entertainment and higher education, in the Breitbart-conservative view, that means they control the commanding heights in our society.

The concept of white men being the persecuted in America largely comes down to being told they’re wrong, or freaking out over nothing when they're told it's something by the right-wing outrage machine. And within the “commanding heights,” whether it be scientists, Hollywood, the media, or Democrats, calling stupid ideas stupid has somehow become “elitist” and evidence of bias. It’s one of the most bitter ironies that the people who bitch and moan about political correctness and wear shirts saying “fuck your feelings” are the ones whining about respect whenever a TV show or movie has a story which steps on their toes, or a science article actually advocates … you know, science which goes against one of their beliefs.

It’s as if we are trying to placate children who want people to hold their hands and play along while they wish really hard for unicorns to be real.

From Reeeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine:

After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal… McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.

McConnell and one of his editors, Michael Dougherty, went to the Thai restaurant panel hoping to find someone to write about the case. They knew most of the speakers — an economics professor, an editor at the WashingtonTimes, a men’s-rights blogger — but their talks were so boilerplate that neither McConnell nor Dougherty could recall much about them. The fourth speaker, however, was a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department who delivered a blistering critique of the Duke faculty’s rush to prejudgment. “Scott and I both thought, Here’s a young guy, he presents himself well, and his talk was the most interesting of the night,” Dougherty said recently. “God, I hate to think that we were part of creating this.”

Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America’s most famous self-identified white nationalist. “In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,” Spencer told me recently. “My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.” The speech at the Thai restaurant — “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term “alt-right.” … It not only launched Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too. On the morning of Spencer’s talk at the Thai restaurant, Miller — who was then a senior at Duke — published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty. Donald Trump didn’t have much to say about the scandal at the time; he hadn’t yet joined Twitter and was devoting his cable-news appearances to his simmering feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But Miller seemed interested in little else. He had become known to some at Duke as the “Miller Outrage Machine” for his willingness to take controversial stands in his biweekly “Miller Time” column, which he wrote for the campus newspaper as a way, he says, to “defend the idea of America.”

This sort of behavior is also present in conservative women. Recent research and ponderings attempting to identify why white women support Republicans and conservative policies more than their non-white sisterhood have largely explained the difference through gender roles and subservience to their partners. For example, during the recent hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republican women (who are for the most part white) were the only demographic among which support for Kavanaugh increased as the process went along.

Why is that?

Republican women are “loyal to party” rather than caring about any criticisms about sexism, threats to women’s rights, or discrimination against females as a group. Taking all of this into account, conservative women seem to interpret criticisms of Republicans and conservative interests as a larger part of the believed victimization of (white) America.

For instance, in 2008, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin set the example of the strong Republican woman who could raise five children, maintain a professional career, and hold her own in the combative world of politics. She called herself a “hockey mom” and “Mama Grizzly” who would protect her cubs at any cost.

During the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Donald Trump provided a culturally acceptable “out” along these lines for conservative women who wanted to support the Republican judge but worried that doing so might be seen as a betrayal of female survivors of sexual assault.

Despite the fact that studies conducted in the past 12 years indicate that false reporting for sexual crimes is rare, Trump constructed an imaginary choice, urging Americans to protect their sons against “false accusations” by women. Pretending to be a wrongly accused son about to lose his job, he said, plaintively, “Mom, what do I do? What do I do?”

Republican women who wanted to support Kavanaugh could stand firm in their roles as mothers and, just like Palin’s “Mama Grizzly,” fiercely protect their cubs (sons), in this case against “false accusations.”

Now, whether these points explain Republican women’s behavior is a matter of debate. But the central problem with all of this is hypocrisy.

I can’t feel sorry for someone who thinks I'm their victimizer just because I ask them to treat people fairly. Why should I reach out to people who think I’m a demon because I’m a Democrat and I vote for people who have a (D) next to their name? The reason many of us feel antipathy to the point of outrage is because the other side is wrong. We know they’re wrong, and they piss on our feet and call us liars for saying it’s not rain. We know they’re wrong, and they enjoy the suffering their wrongness causes. And then they believe themselves to be victims? If it causes “libtard” tears, then it must be good for some of these nuts.

So ... sympathy for these sons of bitches for feeling persecuted? Never.

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Here's Why So Many Right Wingers Think of Themselves as Victims

There’s a guy I work with who generally likes to be the life of the party. If there’s ever time to mess around, he likes to be in the middle of things with jokes, and teasing people. And he can genuinely be a fun addition to the atmosphere of the place. But there are also times he’s a sullen mess because he’s also one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever met, where anything one may or may not realize they’re doing could be interpreted as a slight in his eyes, even though he can be the first to crack wise if it’s someone else. So there are days where he sits silently, like someone in mourning, with everyone walking up to him saying: “Are you okay?” It’s almost like he gets off on the attention, and needs validation in order to function. Needless to say, it’s both annoying and tiring to deal with a drama queen, but most people go along to get along.

There are poor white people out there who care more about Colin Kaepernick’s posture in pre-game than their black neighbors who can’t go to a store or get stopped by police without being harassed. There's an entire swath of America that’s probably more outraged by two women or two men showing affection on television, and how that might “influence” their children, than whether the schools those children attend are fully funded. And we are surrounded by MAGA idiots who covet the title “American” while defiling everything the term stands for.

In essence, this is the thinking of a bully. Hollywood is out to get them. The media is out to get them. And any American who doesn’t see things their way are part of the problem.

And to this end, to point this out, to speak the truth, to call an asshole an asshole, is the height of disrespect in some people’s eyes. The same pricks who can dish it out, calling human beings “animals” or spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about pizza parlor pedophile rings, CAN NOT take it when they’re called on their shit. Then we’re disrespectful.

From James Hohmann at The Washington Post:

Three new deep dives into Donald Trump’s strength in Macomb [County, Michigan] and other Midwestern counties that were previously Democratic strongholds -- written by conservatives, liberals and a nonpartisan journalist -- each highlight a deep craving for respect among supporters of the president and an enduring resentment toward coastal elites that buoys his popularity. Republicans and Democrats who have traveled to Macomb County, which Trump won by 12 points after Barack Obama carried it twice, including by 16 points in 2008, came away struck by these dynamics.

One older white working-class woman recalled that, when she first started voting, “There was so much respect for the president. And I don’t care what he did, or what he said, there was always respect. It was always ‘Mr. President.’” She said she is disgusted by the way people talk about Trump

“We voted for President Obama and still we are ridiculed. Still we are considered racists,” said Cindy Hutchins, a store owner and nurse in Baldwin, Michigan. “There is no respect for anyone who is just average and trying to do the right things.”

“Our culture in Hollywood or in the media gives off the distinct air of disregard to people who live in the middle of the country, as if we have no value or do not contribute to the betterment of society,” said Amy Giles-Maurer of Kenosha, Wisconsin. “It’s frustrating. It really wants to make you stand up and yell, ‘We count,’ except of course we don’t. At least not in their eyes.”

“Live in a small or medium-sized town, and you would think we were dragging the country down,” said Michael Martin of Erie, Pennsylvania. “We aren’t a country just made up of large metropolitan areas. Our politics and our culture up until now has dictated that we are less than in the scale of importance and value.”

If people don’t want to be ridiculed, then they shouldn’t say ridiculous shit. If someone doesn’t want to be called a racist, then don’t do racist things and stand with racists. And if somebody wants respect, then they have to show it to others by acknowledging reality instead of living in make-believe land.

The central problem with all of this is that respect is a two-way street. I can’t respect someone who doesn’t respect me. Why should I reach out to people who think I’m a demon because I’m a Democrat and I vote for people who have a (D) next to their name? The reason many of us feel antipathy to the point of outrage is because the other side is wrong. We know they’re wrong, and they piss on our feet and call us liars for saying it’s not rain. We know they’re wrong, and they enjoy the suffering their wrongness causes. If it causes “libtard” tears, then it must be good for some of these nuts.

So ... respect for those sons of bitches? Never.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, as I’ve been told repeatedly, this is a function of desperate individuals abandoning hope in the system because of the economics of their situation (or not). Maybe this is all about people who’ve thrown in with an egoist because they feel like they haven’t been respected. Maybe it’s about voters, so enamored with someone who doesn’t speak like a robot, they are willing to ignore the words being spoken.

But ... even if one is willing to grant all of these excuses, it’s still not enough. I can’t respect people who rationalize this mess.

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From Paul Waldman at The Washington Post:

In the endless search for the magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican, the hot new candidate is “respect.” If only they cast off their snooty liberal elitism and show respect to people who voted for Donald Trump, Democrats can win them over and take back Congress and the White House.

The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive. It ignores decades of history and everything about our current political environment. There’s almost nothing more foolish Democrats could do than follow that advice.  We see this again and again: Democrats bend over backward to show conservative white voters respect, only to see some remark taken out of context and their entire agenda characterized as stealing from hard-working white people to give undeserved benefits to shiftless minorities. And then pundits demand, “Why aren’t you showing those whites more respect?”

So when we say that, what exactly are we asking Democrats to do? It can only be one of two things. Either Democrats are supposed to abandon their values and change their policies, despite the fact that many of those policies provide enormous help to the very people who say Democrats look down on them, or they’re supposed to take symbolic steps to demonstrate their respect, which always fail anyway. How many times have we seen Democrats try to show respect by going to a NASCAR event or on a hunting trip, only to be mocked for their insincerity?

In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.

When one is involved in a game, there are options beyond winning and losing. Sometimes the best choice is to flip the table over.

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Why Is the Media So Terrible at Covering Stories About Rape?

The fallout from Rolling Stone's decision to backtrack from a story of a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house seems to be evidence of problems with the way some news outlets handle the reporting of sexual assaults, especially given Rolling Stone's first instinct was to blame the alleged victim for the errors in reporting the story instead of acknowledging their mistakes. If Rolling Stone's story brought to the forefront the issue of campus sexual assaults, the backpedaling away from the story seems to have started debates about how rape accusations should be handled and considered not only by the media, but by society. This is usually framed as a conflict between those that feel a presumption of innocence, due process and an ability to confront accusers and accusations are vital. And another side which argues those precepts applies to a courtroom, but not society at large, and a climate where sexual assault survivors are comfortable telling their stories and their claims are taken seriously is more important to the way we treat this issue as a culture.

For example, research about false reporting of rape is about as politically contentious as research about climate change. However, studies consistent with FBI data estimate 2 to 8 percent of reported rapes are false. For the sake of argument, I'm going to meet in the middle and peg it at 5 percent. If accurate, it would mean that in every thousand rape cases, there are potentially fifty innocent people labeled a rapist. Fifty people that will have to live with that mark every time they apply for a job, try to get into a university, obtain credit, or anytime someone runs their name through Google. If we have a criminal justice system, where even with a number of safeguards to protect the accused we still convict and sometimes execute people for crimes they didn't commit, should we then take pause before an internet "mob" with none of those safeguards brands someone a rapist?

Earlier this year, a sexual assault in HBO's Game of Thrones caused considerable controversyand debates over changes from the source material, whether it was actually rape, and if it was inherently misogynistic. Downton Abbey has depicted a beloved character being viciously attacked, and it's used to examine the contours to the relationship she has with her husband. In ABC's Scandal, the rape of a major character was used as a way to shift the perception of a character from that of a selfish wife using her husband's name and position to being a woman that has sacrificed everything for his advancement. With Netflix's House of Cards, the sexual assault in a female character's backstory informs how she became so ruthless. Rape has been a significant part of shows such as American Horror Story, The Americans, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, True Blood, Beverly Hills 90210, Private Practice, etc., etc., etc., and has even been used in romance stories, going all the way back to the "Luke and Laura" love story in General Hospital.

From Karen Valby at Entertainment Weekly:
They’re scenes all too familiar to any TV viewer: A woman is shoved down, she screams or sobs, her eyes grow wide and then blank as she wills herself anywhere else in the world. Lately the small screen has felt particularly thick with such moments of sexual horror, as writers have been churning out story lines in which our saints, our heroines, and our hard and cruel women too, are raped or forced to relive their nightmare of it. Try to imagine a singular abuse endured by an equivalent number of male characters. And yet it seems whenever a female character needs a juicy arc or humanizing touch, writers fall back on the easy, awful crime of rape. ... Here’s something else to imagine: the idea that there are stories to tell about the sources of a woman’s anger, her ambition and fear, her brokenness and resolve, that don’t involve pinning her under some man’s heaving chest.
The latest episode of HBO's The Newsroom, "Oh Shenandoah," had some serious dramatic problems. There were imaginary ghost dads, the horrible use of a classic folk song, a mishandled death, and a really awful rekindled love story between two characters Sorkin refuses to stop pushing down the viewer's throats. But it was a story element involving campus rape that has drawn much ire.

The new owner of Atlantis Cable News (ACN) is pushing new media integration of the network, and to that end wants more coverage of sensational topics for ratings and to trend on Twitter. To that end, Don (Thomas Sadoski) is ordered to investigate a website where rape victims can anonymously tell their stories for the stated purpose of warning others about sexual predators. ACN wants to bring the operator of the website, Mary (Sarah Sutherland), on air to discuss the site and confront her alleged attacker. Mary is presented as a passionate individual which the system has failed, and has resorted to her website as an avenue for some semblance of justice. Don seems to believe Mary's story, but he hates both the idea of the interview and Mary's website since they run contrary to what he believes is fair. Don argues he has a "moral obligation" to believe in the innocence of Mary's attacker and not accuse people in the media, who have not been charged or convicted of a crime, for fear of the innocent people that may be hurt.

From Bill Carter's interview with Aaron Sorkin at the New York Times:
Most of the time the conflict on the show is about ideas, and frequently those conflicts stoke a lot of passionate debate in the days that follow a broadcast ... I understood going in that there would be backlash — some of it thoughtful, some of it less so — but that’s a bad reason not to write something ... I cast a great actress who feels like our sister, our daughter, our roommate. I did everything I could to make it difficult not to believe her so that Don’s declaration that he’s obligated to believe ‘the sketchy guy’ would be excruciating. Let me put it a simpler way. She’s not a rape victim. She is an alleged rape victim and I wanted to make it harder for us to remember that. It’s easy to side with the accused in To Kill a Mockingbird. I made it less easy last night.
However, the way the scene plays has many unfortunate implications. As far as I can tell, no anonymous rape accuser website like the one depicted in the episode actually exists. The closest thing to it, and the possible inspiration for the story, may be the rape wall at Columbia University. But I think the scene's biggest sin is that it falls into one of the biggest criticisms against the show, which is that Sorkin and the series sometimes drift into mansplaining (e.g., see "internet girl"). There have been many scenes in The Newsroom where men sit down and tell women the way the world works. And there's an element of that with this scene. It's not as if Don doesn't make fair and reasonable arguments. He does, and the scene goes out of its way to portray Don as trying to do what he thinks is the "right thing" for this woman. But there's also a failure to acknowledge the woman's agency, since in the end Don puts his judgment above hers.

Moreover, in the greater scheme of the season, this particular story element is sort of haphazardly used by Sorkin as part of an indictment of new media, and a contrast of old-school, idealistic journalistic ethics versus the anarchy of social media and citizen journalists. The episode draws parallels between "wild packs" on the internet that stalk celebrities (e.g., Gawker Stalker) and the implications of rape victims accusing their attackers in the media. And, to that end, others have argued Sorkin presents victim-blaming as a noble position within that context.

  • Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker: "Look, The Newsroom was never going to be my favorite series, but I didn’t expect it to make my head blow off, all over again, after all these years of peaceful hate-watching. Don’s right, of course: a public debate about an alleged rape would be a nightmare. Anonymous accusations are risky and sometimes women lie about rape (Hell, people lie about everything). But on a show dedicated to fantasy journalism, Sorkin’s stand-in doesn’t lobby for more incisive coverage of sexual violence or for a responsible way to tell graphic stories without getting off on the horrible details or for innovative investigations that could pressure a corrupt, ass-covering system to do better. Instead, he argues that the idealistic thing to do is not to believe her story."
  • Eric Thurm, Grantland: "There could not have been a worse time for this episode, airing in a week when there really are questions about ethics in journalism, and about how we cover sexual assault and rape in the media."
  • Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Jezebel: "The most believable aspect of this scenario is that a pompous male journalist would choose to victim-blame a woman who was raped and attempt to justify it with the weak defense that it's about journalistic ethics. (Sound familiar?) The least believable aspect of this scenario is that this woman would entertain Don's bullshit beyond the first denial. Or perhaps she would, but the way the dialogue played out was perfectly shoehorned into Sorkin's apparent notion that laws on the books are more credible than witness testimony, without accounting for how those rules are distorted and applied selectively in an unjust society."
  • Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy, The Guardian: "What The Newsroom, and the actual news, has told women everywhere is that their voices do not exist without being first acknowledged and then substantiated by a man in power – who, by definition, is any man."
  • Libby Hill, A.V. Club: "Aaron Sorkin doesn’t understand who the victim is. He doesn’t understand how empathy works. And he, as a rich, powerful, white man in the United States, doesn’t understand that he is among the most privileged people in the world. 'Oh Shenandoah' tries to assuage our ill-feelings about rape by rampantly defending the rights of famous people from paparazzi, because the complaints of Erin Andrews demand to be heard and validated. This wouldn’t be so troubling if we hadn’t just seen an anonymous college student tracked to her dorm room through rudimentary journalistic stalking and questioned about her rape before being told she shouldn’t tell the world who violated her. Sorkin thinks that women need protecting, especially if they have a target on their back. What he fails to realize is that every woman has a target on her back."
  • Todd VanDerWerff, Vox: "But at the center of the episode's problems was one terrible idea: Aaron Sorkin isn't sure rape victims should be naming their rapists, because somebody somewhere might miss out on a medical school scholarship."
  • James Poniewozik, TIME: "Its arguments about whom to 'believe' in the case of rape accusations were terrible. Its arguments about reporting said accusations were terrible. Its reliance on preachy strawman arguments was terrible. Its cranky obsession with the evils of the Internet was terrible. And it added up—in a final season that began with the promise of the series becoming better and subtler in the end—as a terrible episode even by the standards of the series’ earlier, most terrible ones."

The other aspect to this story is that according to Newsroom writer Alena Smith, Aaron Sorkin yelled at her and told her to leave the writer's room when she objected to this idea.

attribution: Twitter
Sorkin does not dispute Smith's account, but he has released a statement saying he's "saddened" by Smith's comments. In fact, Sorkin feels Smith has violated his trust.
Ultimately I have to go into a room by myself and write the show but before I do I spend many days listening to, participating in and stoking these arguments. As with any show, I have to create a safe environment where people can disagree and no one fears having their voice drowned out or, worse, mocked.

Alena Smith, a staff writer who joined the show for the third season, had strong objections to the Princeton story and made those objections known to me and to the room. I heard Alena’s objections and there was some healthy back and forth. After a while I needed to move on (there’s a clock ticking) but Alena wasn’t ready to do that yet. I gave her more time but then I really needed to move on. Alena still wouldn’t let me do that so I excused her from the room.

The next day I wrote a new draft of the Princeton scenes–the draft you saw performed last night. Alena gave the new pages her enthusiastic support. So I was surprised to be told this morning that Alena had tweeted out her unhappiness with the story. But I was even more surprised that she had so casually violated the most important rule of working in a writers room which is confidentiality. It was a room in which people felt safe enough to discuss private and intimate details of their lives in the hope of bringing dimension to stories that were being pitched. That’s what happens in writers rooms and while ours was the first one Alena ever worked in, the importance of privacy was made clear to everyone on our first day of work and was reinforced constantly. I’m saddened that she’s broken that trust.

Sorkin has claimed The Newsroom is the last thing he will ever do for television. Last night, heparticipated in a Q&A with the Writers Guild Foundation where he defended the episode and expressed the opinion that it was one of the best of the series.

He is quoted as saying "it was the first episode of The Newsroom I thought was really good" and that he felt great about it until he saw the reaction of "vitriol and misunderstanding." Sorkin also said he really dislikes the "terrible inferences" that believe he shares the views of his characters. Though, he didn't exactly state what his exact position is either. One last interesting tidbit from the Writers Guild Q&A, given the reactions above, Sorkin said he believes that if he had written the show under a pseudonym the reaction would be different.

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