This could be indictment week, although given the ten-day extension for Mueller to 26 November, one expects the Mueller indictments after Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile we amuse ourselves with the libertarian fantasies that the public sphere is a neoliberal free-market for ideas...
“We live in an Idiocracy,” read a small note on Blair’s desk, and he was taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000, and it had also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America’s Last Line of Defense to humiliate conservatives who shared Blair’s fake stories as fact. In Blair’s private Facebook messages with his liberal supporters, his conservative audience was made up of “sheep,” “hillbillies,” “maw-maw and paw-paw,” “TrumpTards,” “potatoes” and “taters.”
“How could any thinking person believe this nonsense?” he said. He hit the publish button and watched as his lie began to spread.
[...]
Beyond the money he earned, this was what Blair had conceived of as the purpose for his website: to engage directly with people who spread false or extremist stories and prove those stories were wrong. Maybe, after people had been publicly embarrassed, they would think more critically about what they shared online. Maybe they would begin to question the root of some of their ideas.
Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
There probably will be no Don Jr. indictment yet, considering that the threat of it, especially as a sealed one, makes it difficult for 45* to try his “(_____)day night massacre” ploy. Trump could go ballistic the moment Junior is indicted, although the reality could be that everything’s already in place so that even with the hot-tub mole Whitaker in place, there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
Then there’s the possibility that Governor-elect Gavin Newsom will run for POTUS despite the dirt that Trump will try to leverage as Don Jr dates Newsom’s ex-wife.
Trump called Newsom out for his proposal to have California cover the cost of universal health care for undocumented immigrants.
“Gavin Newsom’s real ambition is not California’s governor seat, it’s the presidency of the United States,” said James Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco. “As soon as the sun rises (Wednesday), people will begin to start identifying GN as a leading candidate for president — when he hasn’t been mentioned in any of the initial talk I’ve heard.”
www.sfchronicle.com/...