I know some readers don’t want to engage with right-wing media, and I can understand that, but I find it useful to see what my political opponents are thinking. For this purpose, there’s a site called TheRighting, set up and run by liberal journalists. You can sign up for a useful daily newsletter with all kinds of right-wing bloviating, and you can see what conservative outlets are on about.
Here’s a bit about the site (more at the link):
TheRighting is a media company that aggregates articles and writing from various right-wing media outlets. The company, which launched in 2017, has a website, a free daily e-newsletter and a social media presence. TheRighting also researches traffic to conservative websites and publishes its findings each month in an exclusive report. The purpose of The Righting is to help inform middle-of-the-road and liberal audiences about stories and viewpoints not on their radar screens that are shaping political opinion across a wide swath of America.
No, it’s not a scam to get you to read Right-wing news. Here’s a video interview with the site’s founder, Howard Polskin.
You can subscribe to the daily newsletter by clicking on the screenshot below.
For one example, I’ve put below the headlines in today’s newsletter. As you see, the Right has its knickers in a twist about coronavirus and how we’re being conned by the government (the pandemic, masks, and vaccines have dominated the site for weeks), how Biden and Kamala Harris are letting us down, and various other beefs that conform to a right-wing agenda (Simone Biles and the American women’s soccer team have been favorite recent kvetches). It’s good to keep your pulse on the Right, especially given how numerous they are, and, if nothing else, the daily newsletter provides a bit of amusement. Once you subscribe, you can unsubscribe, if you wish, by hitting the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the newsletter.
Each entry has a title, the link to the article (always free), and a summary.
The Gay Festival Behind the CDC’s New Mask Guidelines
Provincetown is to gay men what Mecca is to Muslims, and the annual week-long gathering of thousands of husky, large men with a lot of body hair who pack into crowded bars immediately follows the July 4 holiday. So this outbreak was atypical to say the least, and certainly a poor test case to justify inflicting renewed mask mandates on the entire nation.
Bill O’Reilly: The developing problem is not every citizen will take the vax. Plenty of fear. Also, millions of foreign nationals are flooding across the southern border. Many, if not most, are not vaccinated. Biden has no strategy to stop the border madness and little ability to persuade anti-vaxxers. Therefore, when yet another strain of Covid gathered strength, the federal government had no coherent response.
Unvaccinated Less Troubling Than Those Using Intimidation to Save Us
Christine Flowers: I got the vaccine. I hope you get the vaccine. But to me, an unvaccinated citizen is a lot less troubling than a society that uses intimidation and threats in its quest to serve the common good.
After an epic Spring 2021 defeat that saw their entire Covid-19 narrative demolished, our Branch Covidian overlords are back and stronger than ever (if not in reality, at least in their own minds), using the rise of the more contagious – but so far seemingly less lethal – Delta variant to again sow panic and impose their will on a frightened populace.
Stupidest Story of the Week: Put Your Masks Back on
We rose to the occasion with the “fifteen days to slow the spread.” We never overwhelmed the hospitals. We stayed in our houses and worked from home, and some of us even obeyed those idiotic one-way traffic shopping lanes at supermarkets in order to socially distance. But that’s done now, it’s over.
Medical Tyranny Defeating Medical Freedom
Dr. Joel Hirschhorn: Blame Fauci for creating government guidance that blocked use of the cheap generics. Instead, he engineering the wait-for-the-vaccine pandemic strategy. He intentionally traded off the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to pave the way for drug companies to make trillions making vaccines. Sounds awful, but that is the medical tyranny truth.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky Has Made a Mockery of the CDC
It cannot be easy to lead the agency that handles infectious diseases in the midst of an international pandemic. Still, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should at least be able to prove she is up to the task. Dr. Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly proved herself unfit and unreliable. She needs to go.
Biden Administration’s Border Policies Are Spreading Covid Virus
On the one hand, the Biden administration is reimposing mask mandates and burdensome health restrictions we thought we had left behind. On the other hand, it is knowingly ushering in millions of illegal immigrants infected with COVID and not even testing them or keeping track of where they go.
Americans Now Doubt Biden’s Honesty, Empathy and Leadership
Americans are catching onto Biden; they are beginning to see what Democrats, along with CNN and MSNBC, et al, so successfully hid from them during last year’s election campaign. Voters are discovering that they elected a shell of a president, a frequently addled man without conviction who’s every campaign promise was entirely bogus.
Kamala Is Turning Out to Be Biden’s Biggest Mistake
She is the most unpopular Vice President since the 1970s. She badly mishandled an interview with Lester Holt over the immigration process. The American people either don’t know her or don’t like her. That is a very, very bad sign for the Democrats, who need something if they want to try to mitigate the upcoming midterms.
The One Video That Should Shame Woke Hollywood (But Won’t)
Comedian Ryan Long strikes again, shredding La La Land for its cozy China ties.
Politically correct ideology is masking and contributing to the widespread failure of our institutions.
In the United States of Woke, a futuristic dystopia where “progressives” run amok, the widespread use of air conditioning likely would be banned, even in the midst of summer’s oppressive heat and humidity. Why? Because air conditioning not only threatens Mother Earth. It represents racism and “white supremacy.”
General Milley’s Imaginary Coup
The soldier’s irrational fear of President Trump inspired him to defy his duly elected commander-in-chief.
U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Suffers Embarrassing Loss to Canada
David Hookstead: I don’t feel very sad for them, either. Our women’s national team has gone out of their way to alienate as many people as possible with the nonstop protesting and complaining. It seems like they’re focused more on being activists than they are on being players, and the results on the field seem to reflect that fact.
Some Smart Alternatives to College-Degree Tyranny
The modern student loan industry to be one of the greatest and most wretched scams in history. So, unless your career aspirations center on STEM fields, skip college and try something else: a trade school, a technical education, on-the-job experience, an apprenticeship. The key is education over expensive degree.
Most Americans Would Rather See BLM Riots Investigated Over Jan. 6 Capitol Protests
A new poll suggests a majority of Americans want an investigation into last year’s Black Lives Matter protests and riots. According a recent Rasmussen survey, 66 percent of voters would rather see the 2020 BLM incidents investigated over the breech at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Oh my Ceiling Cat, what a spew-fest that is. And that’s just one day’s garbage?
No need, I get the right-wing slant from a couple of unvaccinated, ivermectin dosing, WWG1WGA friends here in Texas/
I realize some of you do not watch the TV much and instead spend many hours on the internet with your devices. If you watch television cable news as I do – CNN, MSNBC and some network news you would get nearly all of this stuff reported there.
Hmm. I find RealClearPolitics to be be a pretty good aggregator. I like that they will put a story like ‘We need to Mask’ right next to story like ‘Masks are crazy.’ I look at some of the other sites that TheRighting appears to aggregate, and they’re kind of a conservative circle-jerk (can I say that on this network?). I’ll keep an eye on this, though. I am interested in which stories, if any, they ignore.
I think that the Washington Free Beacon would qualify for “TheRighting”. Yet is has at least one very good writer, Aaron Sibarium….
https://freebeacon.com/author/aaron-sibarium/
BTW, Andrew Sullivan wrote about P-Town last Friday…excerpts:
“Is Provincetown our future? Count me skeptical. In Fourth of July week, the town was completely swamped this year, followed swiftly by Bear Week; lines for the bars lasted for blocks; the bars themselves were packed; the weather was dreadful, forcing most of the crowd to pack tightly inside. A tiny town built for a few thousand residents has to absorb up to 40,000 in peak season. One bar in particular — the home for a dance party with the inspired name of “Fag Bash” — resembles a kind of dank dungeon where sweat drips from the ceiling and mold reaches up the walls. It might have been designed for viral transmission. A big swathe of the crowd had also just come from a week of Pride partying in New York City and were likely not, shall we say, at their immunological best.
We are at a stage in this pandemic when we are trying to persuade the hold-outs — disproportionately white Republicans/evangelicals and urban African-Americans — to get vaccinated.”
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/let-it-rip
A question: The point of that website is to track dubious news reporting. Now, read this tweet from gay activist Peter Staley about the Delta outbreak….and note especially a critical point that had been left out of NYTimes and Washington Post reporting:
“Peter Staley @peterstaley
If the CDC has increased their Delta Ro because of the Ptown cohort, then they are overstating it for the general population. The cohort was 85% male (WaPo and NYT have both failed to mention this). Hello, it was Bear Week. @apoorva_nyc rightly mentions packed bars, etc., but /1 ”
Times and Post and other mainstream newsources regularly crop information so to avoid stigmatizing (reporting or crime and race work the same way)…….What is the effect of that on their credibility?
I know that Glenn Greenwald may be something of persona non grata to some, but in the past few months he has chronicled major lapses in mainstream reporting. So, I wonder, should there be a site called the “TheLefting”?
Here is the entire twitter thread from Peter Staley:
https://twitter.com/peterstaley/status/1421215604481142785
I don’t know that it’s highlighting dubious stories. I thought it was just to provide visibility to conservative media.
How depressing. There’s so much hypocrisy and double-dealing when you collect this stuff together. They slam the Biden administration for arm-twisting people to get vaccinated but then claim failure because they aren’t sufficiently successful at doing so. This is all so easy for us to see but I get the feeling that the average guy/gal on the street is oblivious to it.
Yeah. My Jeep gets only one radio station and so I hear Hannity (least intelligent and most repetitive person in media), Levin (nastiest and most sanctmonious), and the new guy Dan Bongino (another ignorant egotistical blowhard) enough to keep up with their narrative. Fauci is the bad guy, masks–sorry, ‘face diapers’–are useless and also tyrrany and child abuse, every Democrat is of the Radical Left, etc. Hannity is still banging on about hydroxychloraquine ffs.
It’s disconsoling. They are so loudly and insistently full if crap.
If they selected stories and opinions that represented leadership viewpoints – RNC, influential think tanks, etc.; stuff that is either party line or likely to become so – it would be more useful than this sample. This sample seems to be selected either at random or for interest-value (a.k.a. weirdness).
Rightwingwatch is another good one I’ve been checking for years.
While we’re on the topic of crap aggregators and the crazy theories in print – MEMRI.(org?) translates and summarizes the mouth-agape stunning anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and general hogwash that keeps the Middle East the lovely place it is.
D.A.
NYC
My suggestion is that someone should establish a network of sources that report stories as objectively as possible, and shining a light on extremism, corruption, and propaganda wherever it appears. The worst thing to me is not slanted reporting, but that stories that don’t fit the chosen agenda are just never mentioned at all.
My pattern is that every day I browse the news sources on both left and right, including several mentioned here. Afterwards, I try to look at any available source documents to see what really happened, if anything. I don’t think most people do that. They look at a couple of sources, which are almost certainly agenda-driven, so they get a lot of garbage, much of which seems to be written for the purpose of polarizing them further.
That third choice, scrupulously objective, seems like it would be popular among the large majority of Americans, who actually hold moderate views on most issues, and just want to live in peace and raise successful and happy kids.
I don’t see the advantage of going all-in with either the left or right. That might have worked a few years ago, when the differences between mainstream left and right were relatively minimal. These days, it is Hitler or Stalin. Either, if allowed to proceed to their logical end, will lead us to the same place.
Fox News has recently started blaming immigrants for the latest delta surge. So in the comments I say “so you admit the virus is dangerous; did you get the vax”?. They never answer me.
I also point out that “millions of unvaxed Republicans are far more dangerous than a few thousand unvaxed immigrants.” Again, they have no answer.
Why are Republicans so unwilling to get the vaccine that Trump helped develop at record speed?
And does anybody have a breakdown of the demographic which is unvaccinated?
How does vaccination reduce transmission?
If you are vaccinated, how can your health be endangered by unvaccinated people? Don’t the vaccines work?
I can’t answer the first two questions, but the third and fourth are straightforward enough.
Vaccines reduce transmission by reducing the rate of infection, mainly (they expose the person’s immune system to some aspect of the infection without causing illness, thus allowing a pre-exposed immune system to respond more quickly and effectively when it is exposed to a virus, for instance). An uninfected person obviously cannot spread an infection as easily as an infected person. Also, vaccinated people who DO become infected (there is never a 100% effective vaccine, which is why getting a majority of people vaccinated is important) tend to have less severe symptoms, including things like coughing, which is a major means by which respiratory viruses are spread. Having more vaccinated people in a population will in general make it less likely that there will be breakthrough infections that allow a disease to persist and/or grow. If the overall rate of transmission falls below 1 per infected person, the disease will fall off exponentially instead of increasing exponentially.
See above for part of the answer to the last question pair. No vaccine is 100% effective, so even if vaccinated, the unvaccinated can, in principle, be dangerous. They are also dangerous to those who cannot receive vaccines for medical reasons or who are immunocompromised. The unvaccinated also provide a more fertile environment in which mutations of a virus can emerge, leading to the potential (and actual) occurrence of more contagious and/or dangerous variants of an illness. The unvaccinated are also more likely to have severe and life-threatening disease if infected than the vaccinated, and so put more of a strain on the medical system, the resources of which are finite, thus leading to increased rates of morbidity and mortality in people who would otherwise have received better resources for non-virus-related illnesses, from heart disease to cancer to injuries and accidents and everything else for which people might need treatment in an acute care facility.
Vaccines do work, but not perfectly. If everyone in the world had (miraculously) gotten vaccinated as quickly as was/is/will be possible, it is conceivable that the emergence of more virulent and/or infectious strains would not have happened, or would have happened on a smaller scale. But once a more easily infectious variant of an infectious disease emerges (e.g. the delta variant) it will rapidly tend to predominate over previous versions, especially if there are large numbers of unvaccinated people. And since it IS new/different in at least some aspects, preexisting vaccines might be less effective against it, though retaining at least some protective effect.
So vaccines work and they also don’t work.
And vaccinated people have much lower transmission, so they have to wear masks to protect other vaccinated people. And the CDC says the viral load of vaccinated people is as high as that of unvaccinated people (see Provincetown).
This is called ‘following the science’….
Vaccinated people have less transmission and are also just as infectious as unvaccinated people, according to the CDC.
‘There was virtually no difference in the Ct value between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Fully vaccinated patients has a Ct value of 22.77 while the unvaccinated group had a Ct value of 21.54.’
Meanwhile. Mayor de Blasio announces that 69% of Blacks, 58% of Latinos and the majority of Bronx residents cannot now go to a restaurant because they are unvaccinated.
And yet it is Republicans who are supposed to be the holdouts.
The Ct value is not a measure of transmissibility but of the level at which, in PCR, a preset response occurs, and the study was of a few hundred people. Nevertheless it is sobering that the delta variant is, at least in some cases, able to replicate in fully vaccinated people at a high level. This was not true of earlier variants.
I don’t care what the political party or other demographics of the unvaccinated are. Vaccines reduce risk of transmission of diseases against which they were created, they are not perfect, and because the delta variant is less well protected against, and replicates very quickly in large amounts, it makes sense for even vaccinated people to be careful. Reality is complex. Viruses are apolitical. With new variants, things change. This is not a matter of ideology.
So vaccines reduce transmission, do they?
The CDC looked at Provincetown and found out that vaccinated people had just as high a viral load as unvaccinated people.
‘There was virtually no difference in the Ct value between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Fully vaccinated patients has a Ct value of 22.77 while the unvaccinated group had a Ct value of 21.54.’
You are citing data on the delta variant, specifically among about 200 people who did have breakthrough infection and were tested specifically by PCR, which obviously doesn’t account for people who didn’t catch it (it’s entirely possible that vaccinated people were more cavalier about other precautions than non-vaccinated, but I have no data on that). Nevertheless, it is a troubling concern that people who are vaccinated can still get delta variant, but it is not surprising virologically. This is evolution at work. The vaccine wasn’t designed specifically to prevent the delta variant. It does appear to provide at least some protection against it, but that protection is far from perfect, and thus the CDC’s revewed recommendations about mask wearing and so forth.
So a vaccine will not necessarily reduce transmission (completely) once caught of a virus that is a mutated form of the one against which is was created (though to be clear, the Ct value is not a direct measure of transmissibility), and a form of the virus that appears to replicate in the respiratory tract much more rapidly than the earlier forms of the virus. This is not surprising.
As the authors of this study note in their discussion, “data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak”. It is cautionary finding, though. One of the main reasons to try to get as many people vaccinated as possible (and to maintain other precautions) is to try to decrease the risk of further variants developing that are not as susceptible to the current vaccine. The more often a virus replicates, the more likely there is to be a mutation that makes it more transmissible or more virulent.
You are more patient and more diplomatic than I.
Good info. Also, people that have been vaccinated but still become infected have, on average, a much lower viral load which lowers the chances of them infected others and of becoming seriously ill. Actually, you pretty much already said that.
Robert Elessar did a great job of answering the last two questions. I’ll take a shot at the first two questions.
“Why are Republicans so unwilling to get the vaccine that Trump helped develop at record speed?”
The surprise to me is why Trump put so much energy into developing the vaccine. I think other things loom larger in the minds of Republican voters. Trump downplayed the disease from the start because he didn’t want the economy to be affected on his watch. All his sycophants followed his lead and portrayed COVID as no big deal, much like the yearly flu. Of course the flu does kill and we do have a vaccine for it which many people get but never mind the facts. There is also the long held distrust of the government by Republicans, perhaps enhanced because Biden is in charge now. Then there’s the libertarian and anti-science authority angles. These are far more influential than the fact that the vaccine was developed under Trump.
“And does anybody have a breakdown of the demographic which is unvaccinated?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/us/virus-unvaccinated-americans.html
So Trump downplayed the virus? And all his sycophants portrayed COVID as no big deal?
So who was responsible for the anti-Asian hate crimes, caused by telling people that the Chinese had unleashed a deadly virus upon the world?
New York has just introduced the idea of vaccination before going to a restaurant?
‘New York City Councilman Joe Borelli points out that this will mean 69% of blacks, 58% of Latinos and majority of Bronx residents won’t be able to eat in a restaurant or go to the gym.’
Who knew Republicans were represented on such vast scales in New York?
Yes, Trump downplayed the virus. Later, when the impact of the virus couldn’t be avoided, Trump tried hard to blame the virus on the Chinese. You can look it up. With Trump, the blame always lies elsewhere. His unspoken motto: “The buck never stops here.”
As far as New York and restaurants are concerned, I don’t understand your point. The unvaccinated certainly aren’t all Republicans. AFAIK, no one is saying that.
Trump set up a Coronavirus Task force on Jan 29 2020. Trump declared a Public Health Emergency on Jan 31 2020 and then banned flights from China.
Democrats spent all of February calling Trump racist and handing out impeachment pens instead of doing a single thing to prepare cities like New York for the virus. They did not a single thing.
Your New York Times article clearly states that Black people have a lower take up of vaccinations than white people, even though it tries very hard to ignore that fact.
As for the 210,000 people who crossed the Biden border in July, what percentage do you think were vaccinated or even tested?
Interesting that, according to you, the NYT “clearly states” something while simultaneously trying to hide it. Cute trick.
Stephen Carr, how many unvaxed people got past border patrol and are now inside the U.S. spreading covid? That’s the number you should be worried about. It doesn’t really matter how many were caught and detained, does it?
And how many of the 74 million Trump voters were still unvaxed as of July? I saw one poll that said about half of them were antivax. That’s 37 million. So I think it’s rather Fox News-ish of you to blame the virus surge on “the border crisis”.
So are you implying that the RP and Trumpers are not chronically contradictory? Fail.
I think a service like Ground News, which provides metrics for media bias on both sides is probably more useful.