A curated selection of headlines from the New York Times Sunday Edition Front Page:
Swarming For Favors In a Swamp Trump Built
Far from draining the swamp, Trump has added a foundation and constructed condos. Using his resorts and hotels as a base, he invites the multitude of well-heeled businessmen, wannabes and hangers-on and charges them an ever rising initiation fee to join the ‘membership’. With this new revenue stream, in addition to the additional hotel and banquet fees, Trump has perhaps launched his first ever profitable business.
National Divisions Tear a Hole In a Small Town’s Civil Politics
The politics of divisiveness and racism come to small town America. Historically, the elections for mayor of Montevallo, Alabama have been civil, non-partisan affairs. No more. The town of 6,674 people just endured a campaign filled with innuendo, outright lies, and poll-watching dirty tricks. Ms Joyce Jones, a black female candidate running for mayor, made a seemingly innocuous statement to “consider adding social programs to help the town to not just respond to crime, but to prevent it too”. The next morning, social media was overflowing with claims that she had just promised to “Defund the Police” as part of her “Hidden Liberal Agenda”. Despite repeated denials of this, these unfounded accusations never died down. Later in the campaign, an image of a twenty-year-old “bad check” that Ms. Jones had inadvertently passed, surfaced, and flooded social media. The opposing candidate, of course, denied all knowledge of the image’s origin. Finally, on election, poll watchers for the opposition (a first for the town) systematically denied voting to any Black voter wearing any visible item for support for Ms. Jones (this included both her mother and 98 year old grandmother). No white voters wearing similar items were blocked.
One does not need to be prescient to see what is coming on November 3.
Fertile Ground: QAnon Thrives With Germans
This is perhaps the most disturbing article of the day. The QAnon conspiracy theories are globalizing, catching on not only with the far right ideological groups, but with anti-vaxxers, pandemic deniers and other fringe thinkers. The popularity of this crazy mishmash of outlandish hoax and outright paranoia defies explanation. One is forced to realize that the world is losing its collective ability to think rationally. The future certainly portends to interesting times.
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