Today is, by my way of counting, the one thousand four hundred fifty-seventh day (days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.2016 as the first day).
Tomorrow will be the one thousand four hundred fifty-eighth day.
If one learned that there would be fourteen thousand rather than fourteen hundred days, then still one would carry on as resolutely as on the first day.
Patient determination is a virtue; principle has no expiration date.
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven. Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 10h 07m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1956, Soviet troops enter Hungary to end the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million leave the country.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Smith reports ‘Authoritarian’: Trump condemned for falsely claiming election victory:
Results so far show his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, with an edge in the race to 270 electoral college votes after flipping the state of Arizona, but it could be days before the outcome is known.
“The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect,” said the Biden campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, in a statement.
That Trump had been widely predicted to make a baseless assertion of triumph and resort to the courts to stop votes being counted did not make his 2.21am speech at the White House any less shocking. Some likened the move, unprecedented in American history, to a presidential coup.
“Once again, the president is lying to the American people and acting like a would-be despot,” tweeted Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee. “We will count every vote. And ignore the noise.”
Trump spoke in the east room with numerous US flags behind him and flanked by two TV screens, which had been showing Fox News. Around 150 guests were standing with few face masks and little physical distancing. Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and other family members sat in the front row.
“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight, and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it,” Trump said to whoops and cheers. “We will not stand for it.”
There is no evidence for Trump’s allegation of disenfranchisement.
Stephen Bates writes of The Timely Pessimism of Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nearly 50 years after his death, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr remains a celebrated figure. His admirers include presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama, as well as Cornel West, David Brooks, E. J. Dionne and Andrew J. Bacevich. Fans have been known to say, “Love thy Niebuhr as thyself.” He’s also the subject of the 2017 documentary “An American Conscience,” and for a time, his name served as James Comey’s nom de tweet. As a member of the Commission on Freedom of the Press in the 1940s, Niebuhr delivered a grim diagnosis of the media and the constitutional order. His newly unearthed analysis prefigures many of today’s debates about the role of media, old and new, in molding the fate of American democracy.
In his prolific writings—21 books, chapters in 126 other books, and more than 2,600 articles and reviews—Niebuhr warned against arrogance, self-deception, sentimentality and any more than a mustard seed of hope. History is not a tale of steady progress, he said, or even a tale of unsteady progress; often it’s a tale of catastrophe. In his view, many of the culture’s most harmful illusions stem from a faith that social progress is inevitable, human nature perfectible and utopia just around the bend. People cling to this faith even though, as he put it during World War II, modern history supplies “an almost perfect refutation.”
Take a tour of New York City from space:
more >>Mail-in ballots that meet eligibility and validity requirements are counted in every election. The law requires all valid votes to be counted in every election regardless of how they are cast.
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 10h 10m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1943, five hundred aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastate Wilhelmshaven harbor in Germany.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jennifer Rubin writes Trump can declare whatever he wants, but it doesn’t make it so:
Team Trump, which can never manage to avoid tipping its hand, let on that President Trump would declare victory prematurely Tuesday night even if the race had not been called. It doesn’t matter what he says. Trump declared himself a “stable genius,” but that didn’t make it so. The same is true for elections; self-declaration of a phony victory would signal Trump believes his only avenue — if it exists at all — is to try to delegitimize votes counted after midnight. (For this reason, networks should seriously consider not covering Trump’s intentionally false declaration live.)
In this rush to claim victory, Trump has been spurred on by ahistoric and legally untenable arguments from phony originalists such as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who seemed to suggest in a recent concurrence that states have an interest in declaring a winner the day of the election. This Cinderella theory (that ballots turn into pumpkins at midnight) is simply ludicrous, as are other legal pronouncements making the rounds.
….I asked a few legal gurus who are working on bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to protect the integrity of the election if there is anything to the Cinderella theory. “There is absolutely no historical basis for the idea that all election officials must run a forced sprint to count ballots by any artificial deadline, whether it be midnight Eastern time, midnight local time, or any other time,” says David Becker, from the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “In fact, it’s rare that we know the president by election night.” He points out that “during the time of the founders, it was physically impossible to know the results of the election until weeks after, which is why the electoral college does not meet until six weeks after the election, and why every state does not certify election results until days or weeks after the polls close.” He adds: “In modern times, as we have members of the military voting from overseas, the importance of allowing their ballots to be received days after the election has become even more pronounced, and to require counting of valid ballots to be concluded by election night would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of members of our armed forces, and their families.”
(Emphasis added.)
Julie Carrie Wong reports ‘Putin could only dream of it’: How Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020:
But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.
“I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.”
Inside a comet: Philae’s final secret:
more >>Veteran election lawyer Ben Ginsberg writes My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump:
President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.
This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.
….
Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.
The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.
As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy.
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 10h 12m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1960, Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case.
Recommended for reading in full —
The Atlantic presents The Case Against Donald Trump:
Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus. Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.
Meryl Kornfield reports Ahead of election, experts on authoritarianism warn in joint letter of democracy’s potential collapse:
Fearing the end of democracy as we know it, more than 80 international and American scholars in authoritarianism and fascism wrote an open letter to the public, forecasting a “frightening regression” if safeguards are not put in place.
“Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020,” the experts in 20th-century authoritarian populism, fascism and political extremism wrote in a post published Saturday. Scholars from universities in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Israel and Italy, criticize Trump but do not endorse Joe Biden in the letter, instead arguing that injustices surfaced by the coronavirus pandemic and heightened nationalism are concerning, no matter the election’s outcome.
The experts, who have knowledge of what led to the rise of past authoritarian and fascist regimes, say democracy is at stake.
“We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well,” the group writes. “The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.”
In a list of sweeping recommendations, the group urges the public to protect science, journalism, the electoral process and pluralism, and denounce misinformation, political violence and greed.
“We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law,” they write. “We must replace the politics of ‘internal enemies’ with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, Democratic marketplace of ideas.
“Because if we don’t,” the letter concludes, “we will indeed face dark days ahead.”
Inside The $4 Million All-Electric Plane:
more >>Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 10h 15m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1870, the United States Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) makes its first official meteorological forecast.
Recommended for reading in full —
Economist Jospeh Stiglitz writes Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes (‘President Trump built in tax increases beginning in 2021, for nearly everyone but those at the very top’):
The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
….
By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.
At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.
The tax loss and benefit estimates just described were calculated before the pandemic. Now, incomes for almost everyone but top earners have taken a hit, so the loser group will likely be considerably larger than anticipated; and with people like Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, doing even better than expected, Trump’s gift to him is even bigger.
Jeremy Barr reports The Atlantic gave Ruth Shalit a ‘second chance’ 25 years after a journalism scandal. It ended with an ugly correction:
more >>Two weeks after publishing a long, juicy and instantly viral story about the world of competitive niche sports and the wealthy parents who push their children to play them, the Atlantic on late Friday appended a nearly 800-word editor’s note informing readers that it was “deceived” by the story’s author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.
In particular, the magazine said Barrett incorrectly asserted that the story’s main character, who was identified by her middle name (Sloane), had a son in addition to three daughters in an attempt to blur her identity, and gave a misleading and highly exaggerated description of a fencing injury allegedly sustained by the woman’s daughter. The author had described the incident at a 2019 competition as a “massacre,” in which the girl was stabbed in the neck; in the Atlantic’s updated version of the story, the injury is now portrayed as “not severe.”
In the most scathing and self-flagellating part of the note, the Atlantic said it was wrong to have assigned the story to Barrett, who had earned acclaim as a very young rising-star political writer at the New Republic magazine in the 1990s before her career was derailed by the discovery of major errors and instances of plagiarism in her work.
Here’s the fourteenth annual FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in Whitewater. (The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 editions are available for comparison.)
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening.
10. Radicals and Rhinoceroses.
So there’s an idea, having bubbled up over the summer, that Whitewater is about to become a radical place, a Haight-Ashbury-on-Cravath, because of some summer protests. Not at all. Whitewater’s a town built against any significant change – even moderate progress. It’s more likely that a wild rhinoceros would run down Main Street and eat someone than that Whitewater would become a radical encampment. (To my knowledge, the only account of a rhinoceros running loose and eating someone appears in the early pages of James and the Giant Peach. Sad, to be sure, but wholly fictional.) See Built Against Substantive Change.
9. Leading from Behind. During this pandemic, city workers are at work, and K-12 students are back at school, but neither the city council nor the school board are meeting in person. Some politicians may have health needs that require attendance via audiovisual conferencing, but that can’t be true of all of them. Where these officials send others, they should be prepared to go. Leading from behind isn’t leading at all.
8. Conservatives Who’ve Come to Love Government. How situationally convenient for a few conservatives to set aside their former skepticism of government and now to insist that public schools – a government program if ever there were one – are just the place to be during a pandemic. One hopes that, in fact, there are no illnesses of any kind in the Whitewater public school system. It’s rich, however, to hear conservatives declare that a government-run institution will not only work well, it will work well in conditions for which it hasn’t even been designed.
7. Ad-Sales Offers Styled as ‘Community Grants.’ Sorry, Janesville Gazette, there isn’t anyone that stupid or that gullible. See That’s Not a ‘Community Grant’ – It’s Half-Off Advertising.
6. Hushing and Shushing. The Whitewater Common Council president would like you to speak quickly and try not to repeat yourself during public comments. See In Whitewater, Three Recent Trespasses Against Public Comment.
5. Toxic Positivity. To borrow a line from Hamilton: Awesome. Wow! See Boosterism’s Cousin, Toxic Positivity.
4. Bad to Worse. We might be stuck with this gerrymandered guy; at least he’ll be out of the Wisconsin Legislature.
3. Maskless. If wearing a mask is too hard for the able-bodied, it’s because they’re too soft-headed. See Individual Responsibility in Conditions of Pandemic.
2. The Empty Chair. Sad more than scary, truly. Whitewater still awaits what she most needs: ‘Whitewater needs her own version of Dorothy Day – someone committed to a lifetime of charitable work on behalf of this community without flinching or favoritism. Someone here, who will hold fast come what may, unyielding, beginning and ending each day in the place of her devoted efforts.’ See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day.
1. Trump. What stains the country stains the city. I’m reminded of a cartoon from the Civil War that depicts Benedict Arnold and Jefferson Davis in Hell. I’ll not now speculate on either the theological concept of Hell or Trump’s ultimate fate. As a political matter, however, perhaps a present-day artist will fittingly revise the cartoon to add Trump into the scene.
As always, best wishes for a Happy Halloween.
Update, 10.31.20 — ‘Totally Under Control’ Documentary Streams for Free Through Election Day: “Neon is making “Totally Under Control,” its documentary about the White House’s response to COVID-19, available to stream on its website for free through Election Day on Nov. 3.”
Original post from 10.27.20 follows —
Noted documentarian Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control recounts the course of the coronavirus pandemic in America. The film is available @ Hulu (where I saw it) and on demand.
There’s a way of thinking about the pandemic in which those who discount its effects condescendingly accuse others of being fearful.
I’ll not answer for all others, but in my own case, it’s not fear, but rational calculation, that shapes my thinking. (I’m out and about with standard precautions, including a mask, each day.)
That calculation – the application of reason and reading to circumstances – leads one to see that the costs of the pandemic (in life, health, and wealth) were significantly preventable. Other societies have done better; we could have done far better.
The trailer for Totally Under Control appears above; the description accompanying the trailer appears immediately below.
On January 20th, 2020 the US and South Korea both discovered their first cases of COVID-19. However, 9 months later, the novel Coronavirus has claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans and caused staggering economic damage, while in South Korea, there were no significant lockdowns and, in an urbanized population of 51 million, less than 500 lives have been lost. Where did we go wrong? As the presidential election nears, Americans are increasingly enraged by a lack of clear leadership, endemic political corruption and left to wonder how did the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world manage to fail so thoroughly in its response to a global pandemic?
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, directing with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, interrogates this question and its devastating implications in Totally Under Control. With damning testimony from public health officials and hard investigative reporting, Gibney exposes a system-wide collapse caused by a profound dereliction of Presidential leadership.
Good morning.
Halloween in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 17m 46s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks claim their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons.
Recommended for reading in full —
Steven Greenhouse reports ‘I regret voting for him’: Ohioans hit by GM plant closure reflect on Trump:
In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!”
….
Asked whom she supported in 2016, [Trisha] Amato told me: “I backed Trump,” but she followed that with a quick, nervous laugh. “I thought he stood for more of what I stood for.”
She, too, felt that Trump was the lesser of two evils. Hillary Clinton was an excellent first lady, she said, but to her mind, Clinton, by 2016, had become yet another career politician. “She just changed,” Amato said. “It comes down to character, and I wanted to believe Trump has a better character.”
Amato admits that she woefully misjudged Trump. “After he was elected, he really opened his mouth. He started tweeting and saying things that I feel are crazy. He doesn’t know when to stop.”
Upset at herself for backing Trump, she said: “I feel like I’m living in a reality TV show.” She added: “Trump, he’s a clown.”
She had thought it would be good to have a businessman as president. “But maybe he’s not such a good businessman,” she acknowledged, pointing to his numerous bankruptcies. “He doesn’t understand where the blue-collar workers are coming from. I don’t think any of the big politicians understand that. Trump, especially, doesn’t understand what it is to struggle.”
Christopher Rowland, Debbie Cenziper, and Lisa Rein report White House sidestepped FDA to distribute hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies, documents show. Trump touted the pills to treat covid-19:
The White House decision to set aside the mandatory safety controls put in place by the Food and Drug Administration fueled one of the most disputed initiatives in the administration’s response to the pandemic: the distribution of millions of ineffective, potentially dangerous pills from a federally controlled cache of drugs called the Strategic National Stockpile.
….
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the stockpile, confirmed in an email to The Post that the pills were supposed to go to retail pharmacies but that the agency does not know where the pills ultimately ended up. Through a spokeswoman, the agency said the drugs were supposed to be used for patients with lupus, who encountered shortages early in the pandemic.
The FDA withdrew its emergency authorization in June, after it found hundreds of adverse events linked to the drug’s use in covid-19 patients, including dozens of deaths. In June, two months after the White House’s urgent orders to ship the millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, health officials told holders of the pills in a general notice they could destroy them.
See also Hydroxychloroquine’s false hope: How an obscure drug became a coronavirus ‘cure’:
500m ‘skyscraper’ coral reef discovered off Cape York:
more >>Australian scientists have discovered a massive detached coral reef just off Cape York on the Great Barrier Reef that’s taller than the Empire State Building. The 500m high reef was discovered while a team from James Cook University were mapping the northern Great Barrier Reef seabed.
In New York, a cat leapt from a burning second-story apartment, a bit singed but now recovering —
Amazing video of a cat jumping out of a second floor window in East Harlem Saturday. Police responded to a domestic dispute at Lincoln Houses where they say man locked himself inside apartment & set it on fire. 7 people hurt including 2 cops @NBCNewYork (courtesy Aaron Ganaway) pic.twitter.com/1nLmFnsW0U
— Anjali Hemphill (@AnjaliHemphill) October 25, 2020
Anjali Hemphill reports Smoky Cat Leaps From Burning NYC Apartment:
The feline appeared to be smoking as it took flight, and a spokesperson with the Animal Care Centers of NYC said it did suffer from smoke inhalation but “is in pretty good shape.”
….
Two officers and five tenants were also injured in the apartment fire that was allegedly started by a man wanted on domestic violence charges who locked himself in a room.
Firefighters were dispatched to the apartment near 5th Avenue and 135th Street around 3 p.m. Saturday. Police were eventually able to force their way into the apartment room. The man was brought out unconscious and taken to the hospital.
The man has not been identified and it’s unclear what charges he will face.
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:28 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 20m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tory Newmyer reports Executives pocketed big bonuses before declaring bankruptcy, firing thousands:
“Since the pandemic took hold in March, at least 18 large companies have rewarded executives with six- and seven-figure payouts before asking bankruptcy courts to shield them from landlords, suppliers and other creditors while they restructured,” Abha Bhattarai and Daniela Santamariña report. “They collectively meted out more than $135 million, documents show, while listing $79 billion in debts.”
The payouts preceded layoffs of tens of thousands of workers. Hertz, for one, awarded “$16.2 million three days before its Chapter 11 filing in May;” then won court approval to hand executives another $8.2 million tied to meeting financial goals as it fired 11,000 workers.
The story is the latest in a series of Washington Post investigations into an economic recovery concentrating its benefits among the wealthiest, while piling pain onto workers.
The situation is primed to deteriorate further.
Coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, notching new daily highs. And emergency aid from Washington has largely expired, as lawmakers head home until the election without providing more relief. Those developments prompted stocks to tank on Monday.
But small businesses and millions of jobless workers are facing more acute pain as winter sets in. The pandemic is “exacerbating existing disparities in labor market outcomes,” Lael Brainard, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said in a speech last week. She noted that the pace of the job market’s recovery is slowing down and likely to continue doing so, threatening to leave permanent scars without another major spending package from Washington.
(Emphasis in original.)
Keziah Weir reports Is the GOP Gaming the New York Times Best-Seller Lists?:
In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. A week later, the paper’s books desk released a report that a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of the book by the RNC had contributed to the ranking.
Trump Jr. wasn’t the first in his family to discover the joy of bulk sales—three decades earlier, as the New Republic reported in 2017, his dad encouraged owners of Trump properties to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal, helping it ride the list for 48 weeks. Since then, dozens of nonfiction books each year—including by politicians like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin—have appeared on the list with an assist from bulk buys. Many of those authors used campaign funds to finance the purchases, which the FEC allows as long as the author doesn’t keep the royalties.
In 2020, 17 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list have scored their spots by dint of bulk buys. All but two have been written by Trumpworld superstars: Trump Jr.; founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk; Glenn Beck; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; Fox News host Pete Hegseth; Dinesh D’Souza; Newt Gingrich; Freedom Center founder David Horowitz; Ben Shapiro; Sean Hannity; Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Candace Owens; Jeanine Pirro; the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher; and Ted Cruz. Of these 15, nine appeared on the list for three weeks or less.
(Emphasis in original.)
Orson Welles – War Of The Worlds – Radio Broadcast 1938 – Complete Broadcast:
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