Michelle Goldberg explains why Hillary Clinton has decided to address Donald Trump’s association with the so-called “alt-right” white nationalist movement. “Trump has given the alt-right unprecedented political relevance,” Goldberg writes. “It’s not just that he’s a hero to the movement. He has actively helped expand its reach.” (Writing later in the day, Isaac Chotiner called Clinton’s Thursday speech “extremely effective.”)
The so-called presidential “race,” which is being covered in the media like it’s close, is a joke, Jamelle Bouie writes (to the sound of superstitious people across the country knocking wood). “Clinton’s odds of losing this election amount to the general chance of an unimaginable black-swan event that transforms the political landscape,” Bouie argues. “If you think there’s a 10 percent chance that the American economy collapses before November, then that is roughly the chance that Donald Trump wins this election.”
Isaac Chotiner interviews Appalachian-born J.D. Vance, the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, about white poverty and support for Trump. “I don’t think that economic anxiety or racial anxiety is really what’s driving the Trump phenomenon,” Vance told Chotiner. “What I think is driving the Trump phenomenon is this social and cultural anxiety that I write about in the book. It’s the sense that the world around you is falling apart. It’s not just that you can’t find a good job; it’s that your kids are dying of opioid overdoses. It’s that your families are breaking apart. … It’s just this broad sense that the entire world is sort of conspiring against you.”
Why do internet writers (including Yours Truly) like to insert random capital letters into their sentences? Katy Waldman has some theories. Maybe, she writes, “it’s all Twitter’s fault. Twitter does not allow users to type in boldface or italics. Accordingly, we have to sleuth out other ways to pack our posts with emphasis. … Those compensatory norms trickle into our non-Twitter communications, and our sentences grow into Spiky Forests of Surprise Capitalization.”
For fun: Poor Ann Coulter.
Awwwwwww,
Rebecca
