Review: Erasing History

Erasing History by Jason F. Stanley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson R. Cowie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man who spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local disco while dealing with social tensions and disillusionment in his working class ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn. The story is based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a mostly fictional 1976 New York article by music writer Nik Cohn.

He wrote the 1976 New York article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", which was the source material for the movie Saturday Night Fever.[1] In 1996, Cohn revealed the article to have been a complete fabrication, based only on clubgoers he knew from his native England.

From the INtro

From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10
The mercurial nature of the politics of ’72 was such that when Wallace was eliminated from the race, Dewey voted for the most left-leaning candidate of any major party in the twentieth century, Democratic senator George McGovern. The choice did not come easily. The autoworker was genuinely stumped about whether incumbent Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority or challenger George McGovern’s soggy populism best represented his interests. It would be a betrayal of everything he stood for to vote for a Republican, he believed, but he had grave concerns about McGovern and his entourage of student radicals. He also sensed a “meanness” creeping into McGovern’s campaign after he threw vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton off the ticket due to his earlier problems with mental illness. Much of the labor movement, especially the hierarchy of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), could not stomach McGovern’s New Politics with its anti-war positions, youth movements, and commitment to open up the Democratic Party to wider spectrum of Americans. The labor federation, fearing for its traditional kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, fought the McGovern insurgency with every scrap of institutional power it could muster.11
Meantime, Richard Nixon, taking his cues from Wallace, was designing his own heretical strategy to woo white working-class voters away from the party of Roosevelt. His plans to build a post-New Deal coalition—the “New Majority” he liked to call it—around the Republican Party in 1972 was based on making an explicit pitch for white, male, working-class votes by appealing to their cultural values over their material needs. His targets were men like Burton, who had first been dislodged from the Democratic mainstream by George Wallace. Despite Nixon’s courtship of Dewey’s vote, the autoworker remained suspicious of Nixon’s loyalties. “Nixon hasn’t proved anything to me when he raises the prices of new cars and freezes the wages of the people who build them,” Burton explained about falling back on bread-and-butter Democratic politics with his vote for the left-leaning McGovern. “I really don’t think McGovern will win,” he finally concluded. “But maybe if we vote for him we can show Nixon what we want, what the working man wants.” The majority of white working-class voters disagreed, selecting Nixon...

The remobilization of the business leadership was one of the most dramatic shifts in postwar policy history, recasting the legislative landscape for generations to come. If the New Deal was the revolution, this was the counter-revolution. Having contained labor policy for the entirety of the postwar era, corporations lost key legislative battles during the Johnson and Nixon years, fought to a stalemate during the transition period from 1975-77, and, by 1978, got reorganized and stood poised to win almost every battle on taxation, spending, regulation, and inflation for decades to come.28


II
Despite the draconian demands of policy makers, few working people were immediately abandoning the Keynesian ship—there was not a large-scale lurch to the right in popular economic thinking. The conservative movement made substantial inroads into white workers’ cultural identity in the late sixties and early seventies, but it was still a long way from scoring points on economic grounds. This is where Nixon’s groundwork on wooing working-class voters paid off, and where conservative strategists began to learn what country musicians already knew. Economics may have broken the policy levees and convinced policy elites, but it was the social issues that delivered working people to the new political waters. As the New Right’s media guru Richard Viguerie noted, “We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. We talked about the sanctity of free enterprise, about the Communist onslaught until we were blue in face. But we didn’t start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues.” In a similar vein, Pat Buchanan continued his earlier work for Nixon, plowing terrain and sowing seed for a working-class right—often consciously setting the poorer and the more affluent elements of the New Deal coalition off from one another. The future of the Republican Party, he argued, would be as “the party of the working class, not the party of the welfare class.” The federal government and know-it-all cultural elitists were well on their way to eclipsing the bosses as the workingman’s enemy. As M. Stanton Evans, the president of the American Conservative Union, put it, the key was finding a common ground of anti-statism: “some of them reach their political position by reading Adam Smith while others do so by attending an anti-busing rally, but . . . all of them belong to a large and growing class of American citizens: those who perceive themselves as victims of the federal welfare state and its attendant costs.”29
William Rusher, in his 1975 book The Making of the New Majority Party, argued, like Tom Wolfe, that the politics of old class divisions were over. An odd cross-class coalition of business, industrialists, blue-collar workers and farmers stood in opposition to a McGovernite “new class led by elements that were essentially non-productive” members of the chattering classes—like academics, intellectuals, government bureaucrats, and the media elite—who claimed to know what was good for the nation. The modern welfare state, Rusher argued, “exists simply as a permanent parasite on the body politics—a heavy charge on both its conscience and its purse, carefully tended and forever subtly expanded by the verbalizers as justification for their own existence and growth.” Although strategists like Rusher and Viguerie had hoped that they might be able to entice former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan as the standard bearer for a new Conservative Party (sharing a dream ticket with George Wallace, they hoped), Reagan finally rejected the tactic of a new party but fully embraced the white working-class Republican ideal. In 1976, Reagan failed to win the nomination of his party for the presidency, but he was en route to capturing its soul.30
As Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1977, “And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean:The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.... The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.


The New Right’s coalition linked worker and businessman, shop floor and Wall Street, tavern and country club, cultural conservative and economic libertarian. Roosevelt’s famous “Forgotten Man” was becoming a Republican, his enemy less the “economic royalists,” the class elites, against which Roosevelt inveighed in his landslide 1936 victory, than the cultural elitists who would look down on the politics and culture of blue-collar America. Not all of even the white, male working class joined the New Right, of course, but certainly enough to make a viable coalition on the margins where elections are won.

"It's the economy, stupid!"

The cultural exhaustion crept in alongside the decline in union victories. “Maybe Vietnam, the civil-rights thing, Watergate and all the rest of it wore me out,” she continued. “I worry more now about the price of a head of lettuce than the issue of who picked it.” The decline was hard to take.

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Review: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Preface

One day I attended a book party for an older Iranian woman who had written her memoirs. She spoke for an hour about her eventful life. Although she never touched on politics, she mentioned in passing that her family was related to the family of Mohammad Mossadegh, who served as prime minister of Iran for twenty-six months in the early 1950s and was overthrown in a coup d'etat staged by the Central Intelligence Agency.

After she finished speaking, I couldn't resist the temptation to ask a question. "You mentioned Mossadegh," I said. "What do you remember, or what can you tell us, about the coup against him?" She immediately became agitated and animated.

"Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?" she cried out. "We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?"

This outburst reflected a great gap in knowledge and understanding...

As a postrevolutionary generation came of age in Iran, Iranian intellectuals began assessing the long-term effects of the 1953 coup. Several published thoughtful essays that raised intriguing questions. One appeared in an American foreign-policy journal:

It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran.

The 1953 coup and its consequences [were] the starting point for the political alignments in today's Middle East and inner Asia. With hindsight, can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?

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Review: The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines

The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines by Pippa Latour
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own

American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own by Jonathan Alter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life by Philip G. Zimbardo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time-based personality types

In our work, we have consistently found that time perspective plays a fundamental role in the way people live. People tend to develop and overuse a particular time perspective—for example, focusing on the future, the present, or the past. Future-oriented people tend to be more successful professionally and academically, to eat well, to exercise regularly, and to schedule
preventive doctor’s exams. The “late” seminarians and other individuals who live in fast-paced communities are likely future-oriented and so are less willing to devote their time to
altruistic pursuits.

In contrast, people who are predominantly present-oriented tend to be willing to help others but appear less willing or able to help themselves. In general, present-oriented people are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, to gamble, and to use drugs and alcohol than future-oriented people are. They are also less likely to exercise, to eat well, and to engage in preventive health practices such as flossing their teeth and getting regular doctor exams.

Consequently, future-oriented people are the most likely to be successful and the least likely to help others in need. Ironically, the people who are best able to help are the least likely to do so. In contrast, present-oriented people are less likely to be successful but are more likely to help others. Again ironically, individual who are most likely to help others may be those least likely to help themselves. The situation is more complicated when we consider people whose primary time perspective is the past. For some, the past is filled with positive memories of family rituals, successes, and pleasures. For others, the past is filled with negative memories, a museum of torments, failures, and regrets. These divergent attitudes toward the past play dramatic roles in daily decisions because they become binding frames of reference that are carried in the minds of those with positive or negative past views.

Surveys: https://www.thetimeparadox.com/

Stoic, quote from Epictetus - "It's not things that upset us but our judgments about things"

We authors believe that the past matters, but it matters less than Freud and the behaviorists claimed. Everyone is affected by the objective past but not completely determined by it. And it is not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Your attitudes toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves. This distinction between the past and your current interpretation of it is critical, because it offers hope for change. You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitudes toward what happened. Sometimes changing the frame can alter the way you see the picture.

HOW DO YOU BECOME FUTURE-ORIENTED?

No one is born with a future time perspective. No gene pushes people into a future time zone. You become future-oriented by being born in the right place at the right time, where environmental conditions help transform little present-oriented babies into restrained, successful, future-oriented adults. These conditions include:

Living in a temperate zone
Living in a stable family, society, nation
Being Protestant (or Jewish)
Becoming educated
Being a young or middle-aged adult
Having a job
Using technology regularly
Being successful
Having future-oriented role models
Recovering from childhood illness

Living in a Temperate Zone

Preparing for seasonal change involves planning and modifying behavior to fit the changing weather. For that reason, people become used to anticipating worse weather in winter and summer than in the usually glorious fall and spring. In contrast, living in a mildly tropical climate is being in paradise with an extended lease. It is always the same season, only with more or less rain.

Living in a Stable Family, Society, Nation

When you focus on the future, you make decisions that anticipate consequences. In predicting the pluses and minuses that will result from a given action, you assume there is sufficient stability for you to make that judgment possible. A stable government and family allow you to predict what actions will generate desired rewards or, indeed, if there will ever be the promised reward for chores you do now. In general, stable, reliable environments are likely to be the best breeding grounds for budding futures.

Being Protestant (or Jewish)

The concept of original sin in Christian doctrine is based on Eve’s succumbing to her present-oriented appetite when the serpent tempted her to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. All Christians have been paying for her moment of “weakness” ever since, and are often reminded that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” After the Protestant Reformation, Calvinists in particular came to believe in predestination—the idea that God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned. The worldly sign of this destiny was apparent in one’s worldly success and accumulation of wealth. The Protestant work ethic generated a new hardworking class of entrepreneurs. In general, even today the gross national product of primarily Protestant nations is greater than that of Catholic nations.

Being Jewish is likely to push one toward future orientation, because Jewish tradition honors scholarship and education as a means of personal and community advancement. Education in academic settings is all about goal-setting, planning, delaying gratification, and anticipating rewards for progress, the building blocks of a solid future-oriented foundation.

Becoming Educated

Education makes a student more future-oriented. Schools teach delay of gratification, goal-setting, cost-benefit analysis, and abstract thought. Cynics would argue that the subtext of a program for success is learning to respect authority: staying in one’s seat, knowing one’s place in the hierarchic ranking of intelligence, and learning to tolerate boring lectures, all in the promise of securing boring jobs. Nevertheless, education is the boot camp that trains presents to become futures.

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Review: Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution

Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Twentieth-century ecology emerged from the intellectual frame-work historically associated with an organic approach to nature and society. Employing the hierarchical variant of the organic model, ecologists in the early decades of this century used concepts such as "organic community," "mutual interdependence," and "evolution toward higher forms" on a hierarchical scale to provide an under-standing not only of the organization of bacterial colonies, grass-land climax vegetation, and bee and ant communities, but also of human tribal societies and the world economy. They stressed an evolution toward greater cooperation on a worldwide basis and argued that nature could provide the model for an ethic of human sharing, integration, and unity. But the emergence of fascist tyranny based on a centralized organismic model glorifying the father as absolute dictator undermined the evolutionary hierarchical component of their argument, and ecology turned in a mathematically reductionistic direction.

Post industrial info age charismatic autocratic disruptor

Millenarianism represented a preindustrial form of social revolution. It differed from the movements of the industrial revolution by preparing people, through revelation, to accept revolutionary change, as opposed to politicizing the working class. Signs in the heavens, prophets, and saviors would appear predicting the arrival of the millennium. For example, persisting since the Middle Ages was the prophecy that Frederick I (Barbaroso), King of Germany, would be resurrected; he had died in 1190 on the third crusade and was idealized as a savior of the poor who would bring with him a communal state. He would banish the Pope as Antichrist, and destroy his cohorts-the clergy, the wicked, and the rich, well-fed laity. Throughout the Middle Ages, prophets and written manifestos sustained revolutionary influences and the real hopes of the poor for a new social order.

England European

... By the end of the century, childbirth was passing into the hands of male doctors and "man-midwives."

While women's productive roles were decreasing under early capitalism, the beginning of a process that would ultimately transform them from an economic resource for their families' subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands, the cultural role played by female symbols and principles was also changing. The female world soul, with its lower component, Natura, and the nurturing female earth had begun to lose plausibility in a world increasingly influenced by mining technology essential to commercial capitalism. The older organic order of nature and society was breaking up as the new mercantile activities threatened the ideology of natural stratification in society.

Symbolic of these changes were the midwife and the witch. From the perspective of the male, the witch was a symbol of disorder in nature and society, both of which must be brought under control. The midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men the forceps. But from a female perspective, witchcraft represented a form of power by which oppressed lower-class women could retaliate against social injustices, and a source of healing through the use of spirits and the regenerative powers of nature. For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function. But until medical training became available to women and licensing regulations were equalized for both women and men, women had no opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the older, shared traditions of midwifery as an art with the new medical science.

Descartes
moved the spirit out of matter in sensing a mechanized world

Similarly, his Principles of Philosophy (published in 1644) re-structured the cosmos as a mechanism, based on the motion of inert material corpuscles that transmitted motion consecutively from part to part through efficient causation. The force that produced the motion was not something vital, animate, or inherent in bodies, but a measure of the quantity of matter and the speed with which they moved. Motion was external to matter and was put into the universe at the moment of creation. It could be transferred among bodies, but its total amount was conserved from instant to instant by God. Change occurred through the rearrangement of inert corpuscles. The spiritus mundi of the Neoplatonists was translated into a subtle mechanical ether whose whirlpool circulations pushed the planets around, a sleight-of-hand not lost on subsequent critics such as Henry More and Henry Power.

The ghost got back into the machine, ushered in by the forgotten Leibniz-inspiring and Kabbalah-reading Anne Conway, an English philosopher whose work was in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists.

THE MONADS OF CONWAY, VAN HELMONT, AND LEIBNIZ.

By September, after Van Helmont's March 1696 arrival in Hanover, one finds in Leibniz's writings the first use of the term monad to characterize his concept of "individual substance." In long hours of conversation with Leibniz and the Electress Sophie, Van Helmont spoke about his own ideas, those of Anne Conway, and of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, conversations which Leibniz found "very instructive," in contrast to Van Helmont's books, which were more enigmatic.

Prior to 1696, Leibniz had used the terms entelechie, formes substantielles, unité substantielle, point metaphysical, and forces primitives interchangeably to mean "individual substance." But in 1696, the disparate elements of his metaphysics coalesced when he began using the concept of the monad to represent an independent individual-a substance endowed with perception and activity-existing in a state of accommodation and consensus with other substances.

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Review: Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy

Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy by Isaac Arnsdorf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: War by Other Means: Analyzing Proxy Conflicts and Their Potential to Escalate

War by Other Means: Analyzing Proxy Conflicts and Their Potential to Escalate by Barrett Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars



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Review: More Alternative Truths: Stories from the Resistance

More Alternative Truths: Stories from the Resistance by Bob Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars



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Review: The Joy of Pi

The Joy of Pi by David Blatner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of pieces from Adams, an anthology gathered from the dead man's hard drive (R.I.P.) and odd pieces from here and there. There are some themes that emerge. This includes the yearslong, frustrating effort to get a Hitchhiker's Guide movie made. While that project was not getting sufficient interest, Men in Black, the 1997 movie based on the Aircel comics book bought by Marvel came out. Adams reports this disproved any notion that sci fi comedy wouldn't work. Also Adams felt miffed at how some elements were overly "familiar". He doesn't cite specifics, but I think his list must include:
* When K reveals there are about 1500 aliens on Earth and most of them are on Manhattan just trying to make a living, James asks "Cab drivers?". This is a reference to writer Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' novels, particularly the final novel 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish', where archivist Ford Prefect's entry in the Guide hints that driving a cab is a good way to make a living for aliens visiting New York.
* The final scene reveals that our universe is seen to exist in a gaming marble, just like the miniature galaxy. Both the scene and concept of the miniature galaxy were was inspired from Douglas Adams's novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', where Ford Prefect tells Arthur Dent he knew of a planet that got used in a game of inter-galactic bar billiards and was potted into a black hole ("only scored 30 points, too").

There is also a fair amount about his atheism, stance against dams as more harm than good, and frustrations and excitement with personal computing, especially around Macs. I would have loved to work with him in gathering user stories for software design. He had an eloquent and unwavering vision for how ease of use should present in consumer technology.

Also, this reminds I need to someday read the Dirk Gently books. His future plans for that are only a small percentage of the content here.

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Review: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The Henry Miller Reader

The Henry Miller Reader by Henry Miller
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

...Listening to their recital I got the impression that the whole neighborhood was crippled and riddled with malignant diseases.

Everybody with whom they had any dealings, friend, relative, neighbor, butcher, letter-carrier, gas inspector, every one without exception carried about with him perpetually a little flower which grew out of his own body and which was named after one or the other of the familiar maladies, such as rheumatism, arthritis, pneumonia, cancer, dropsy, anemia, dysentery, meningitis, epilepsy, hernia, encephalitis, megalomania, chilblains, dyspepsia and so on and so forth. Those who weren't crippled, diseased or insane were out of work and living on relief. Those who could use their legs were on line at the movies waiting for the doors to be thrown open. I was reminded in a mild way of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. The difference between these two worlds other- wise so similar lay in the standard of living; even those on relief were living under conditions which would have seemed luxurious to that suburban working class whom Céline writes about. In Brooklyn, so it seemed to me, they were dying of malnutrition of the soul. They lived on as vegetable tissue, flabby, sleep-drugged, disease-ridden carcasses with just enough intelligence to enable them to buy oil burners, radios, automobiles, news-papers, tickets for the cinema.

"Why are so many people into astrology?"

“Someone might struggle to admit they’re feeling vulnerable, but can more easily acknowledge ‘my Cancer moon is really sensitive today,’” Solas ["an Irish psychic intuitive"] says.

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Review: Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy

Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy by Bill Adair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the final days before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in early 2023, the Democrats who controlled the January 6 committee released hundreds of transcripts, emails, and reports. Because Republicans planned to abolish the committee when they took over, the Democrats gave the documents to the U.S. Government Publishing Office, which posted them on a little-noticed website.

Scattered throughout the site were more than a dozen interviews with people who had invaded the Capitol or otherwise been involved in the insurrection. It took me some time to decipher the messy system for storing the transcripts—it was like the Democrats had tossed the transcripts in a closet as they were rushing to vacate an apartment—but I eventually identified the ones for the January 6 attackers. Individually and collectively, the interviews told a detailed story about the attackers’ backgrounds, education, occupations, sources of political information, and what motivated them to come to Washington to join Trump’s protest. The investigators were methodical and asked similar questions of each person.

As I compiled quotes of the attackers, two patterns emerged. One involved the social media that the insurrectionists used to connect with one another and get their political news. The investigators asked them if they relied on widely used platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, and also asked about smaller apps and sites that were used by conservatives and the far right such as 4Chan, Gab, Truth Social (founded by Donald Trump), and Parler. But the transcripts revealed the smaller conservative sites were not popular with the people who stormed the Capitol. When the investigators asked about social media, they heard one answer over and over.

Facebook.

The investigators found a similar pattern when they asked about news sources. The January 6 attackers had some variety in the sites they used to keep up with politics—a few occasionally looked at the mainstream media and a couple of them said they even checked out the much-derided CNN—but there was one source that nearly every one mentioned.

Fox News.

https://webharvest.gov/congress117th/...
Eric Barber

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