WEDNESDAY: We thought M. Gessen made a nice choice...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2025

...with respect to that one key word: We thought M. Gessen made a good observation with respect to a small bit of language. 

The passage comes from a new column in the New York Times. Gessen describes the "arrest" of a student at Tufts. A bit of advice is implied:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

[...]

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something—asks something—struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

These mass transports are not "deportations," Gessen says, in the way we normally think of such actions. As Gessen goes on to describe the difference, a key point is being made.

We denizens of Blue America should think with great care about the language we use. Describing these actions as "deportations" (full stop) helps normalize the actions in question—helps make them seem more routine, more understandable, than they actually are.

We should all be careful about "using our words"—about avoiding the transmission of misleading impressions. We were also struck by a choice of words made by Adam Serwer in the (not-failing) Atlantic:

Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have.

Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. His administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men deported to a gulag in El Salvador “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Many appear to not have criminal records elsewhere either. 

A certain word appears in the headline, then in the second paragraph. Serwer uses that word four more times, referring on three of those occasions to "an overseas gulag."

Serwer also uses a kinder/gentler term, one which is much more conventional. But when he does, the word arrives suitably wrapped: 

ICE rounded these men up in early March, and then put them on a plane to the Central American nation, alleging that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The men were then imprisoned in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a prison infamous for reported human-rights violations including, allegedly, torture. 

[...]

So far, the Trump administration has provided only weak evidence that any of the men condemned to a foreign prison notorious for human-rights violations were guilty of anything. 

You may not want to say gulag gulag gulag gulag all through some discussion of these unusual events. But if you find yourself saying "prison," it's important to make it clear that, as with these "deportations," we're speaking here about a "prison" of a strikingly different kind.

In our view, Serwer made another excellent choice: 

Despite the absence of evidence, the administration continues to refer to these men publicly as “gang members” and “terrorists,” and they have become fodder for Trumpist propaganda. Last week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a depraved video with the prison as her background, advertising the Trump administration’s willingness to deport people overseas to be tortured by the bureaucracy of a strongman whose own government the American authorities have said is affiliated with organized crime...

You might want to be careful with the word in question. That said, we're not inclined to disagree with Serwer's choice. We refer to this key word: 

Depraved.

Full disclosure: This post was typed while President Trump was making his oration about his tariffs. (No one has ever heard anything like it!)

In our view, something is plainly "wrong" with this man. We regard that as a tragic loss of human potential, but we badly need to find the words with which to convey that point of concern.

We expect to explore that topic nest week. We Blues do need to improve our skills when it comes to using our words.

PERSONS: When "Elon" made his latest claims...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2025

...few persons seemed to care: It may be time for Chainsaw Charley to stop payment on those checks!

We refer, of course, to Elon Musk—to the million-dollar checks he handed out in Wisconsin over the weekend. 

Along the way, he transitioned from Chainsaw to Cheesehead Charley. His peculiar behavior is fully visible—has been for a long time. 

Is something "wrong" with this influential person? It's time for us to ask. Also, it's time for us to start using our words to describe him as he actually is—but that's a topic for another time, perhaps for next week's reports.

For today, the stumblebum took a defeat in last night's Wisconsin election. His odd behaviors didn't seem to sell among Badger State voters. Then too, there's what this visibly strange person said to Bret Baier last Friday evening.

From the start, Baier referred to his interview subject as "Elon." We showed you the words of that guest in Monday's report. 

Musk was sitting for an imitation of an interview with seven alleged associates. Four minutes into the session, this exchange occurred:

BAIER (3/28/25): For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. Just—we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

You know, for example, like the simple survey that was—literally, a ten-question survey. You could do it with SurveyMonkey—it would cost about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.

BAIER: For just a survey.

MUSK: A billion dollars for a simple online survey, "Do you like the National Park?" And then, there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane.

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can see the transcript and the videotape of the Fox News session simply by clicking here.

At any rate, sad! In the exchange we've posted, the richest person in D.C. had lobbed a silly softball at the planet's richest person. Just this once, we'll let you ask us to perform a translation: 

Translation, Softball to English:
BAIER: What's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?
ENGLISH: Please say whatever you want our millions of viewers to hear.

So it can go with the persons who people the (so-called) Fox News Channel. And so it can go when a person like Musk replies.

Musk seemed to be making a rather remarkable claim. Everything is always possible, of course—but this is what he had now said:

According to Musk, "the government" had paid "a billion dollars" (originally, almost a billion dollars) for a simple bit of product which should have cost ten grand. Moments later, one of fellow's alleged associates made the claim more specific:

BAIER: But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers, right?

STEVE DAVIS: Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars. 

For example, the $830 million, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money that wouldn't have been found if the DOGE team wasn't working with, in that case, the Department of Interior. 

But then, taking it one step further, DOGE then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. It would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now, anyone can just log into DOGE.gov anytime and see these payments as— They're not yet in real time. They're close, but they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.

With that, the facts had been nailed own. Or was it just a set of claims?

We were now less than five minutes into this "interview session. Baier seemed to have cast himself in the role of potted plant. 

The initial billion-dollar claim had been nailed down. Now, a very unusual bit of conduct occurred. Within the halls of CBS News, some persons now published a fact-check!

Why do we call that conduct unusual? Simple! Given the kinds of person who now people our mainstream news orgs, it seems to occur to very few people that a claim like that, broadcast to millions, should be subject to public review.

On its face, Elon's clam was startling. Plainly, it had been intended to seem that way.

That said, was the claim in question accurate? Was the startling claim really true? From within the halls of CBS News, an initially typo-riddled fact-check piece started exactly like this:

Musk makes false claim about billion-dollar National Park survey

Elon Musk claimed in a Fox News interview Thursday night that the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, frequently uncovers "billions" in government waste, citing a supposed $1 billion survey about National Parks as an example. 

CBS News found no evidence that the Department of the Interior spent or planned to spend that much on a survey or on any single contract. 

[...]

Later in the Fox News interview, Steve Davis, who works closely with Musk at DOGE, said that the online survey was part of an $830 million contract by the Department of the Interior that DOGE stopped. 

Do the fact-check began. 

By now, the initial typos have been corrected. Having said that, Say what? 

CBS News "found no evidence" that this jaw-dropping claim was true? Eventually, the fact-check added this:

CBS News has reached out repeatedly to the White House for more information. The Department of the Interior declined to comment. 

No $830 million contract is visible on DOGE's online "wall of receipts," the list of contracts the group said it has terminated. According to data published on the site, only five canceled contracts have a total estimated value of over $800 million, and none are from the Department of the Interior. 

In the interview Davis also said "[DOGE] publishes these things on our web site for maximum transparency. So, now, the general public—it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now, anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they are not yet in real time." 

But CBS News and other news organizations have been reporting for weeks on the errors and overstatements of savings that have been posted there.

Oof! As you can see right in its headline, CBS News seemed to be saying that the DOGEmaster's startling claim has been false! CBS also seemed to slap aside Davis' claim about transparency.

Continuing directly, CBS even said this:

DOGE recently re-formatted their website making it more difficult for the general public to confirm savings and cancellations. Anyone accessing the "wall of receipts" page needs to manually navigate through 711 webpages to see the entire list of contracts, 923 webpages for grants and another 68 pages for cancelled or expired leases. 

Available federal contracting data does not show any individual contract valued at over $800 million awarded by the Department of the Interior over the last 17 years. The DOGE "wall of receipts" currently lists 366 cancelled contracts for the Department of the Interior; 199 of those are listed as $0 in savings. The total savings DOGE claims for the remainder adds up to only $144 million. 

The three largest alleged savings for canceled contracts associated with the Department of the Interior on the "wall of receipts" are for $37 million, $23.5 million and $10.75 million. The latter two appear to be mislabeled and are actually USAID contracts. 

So said CBS News. But are those claims really true?

Let's go ahead and use our words. CBS News seemed to be describing stumblebum conduct on the part of these masters of the known world.

We're showing you what CBS wrote. We can't tell you, with ultimate certainty, what is actually true—but we can tell you this:

By now, the fellow in question seems to have has been involved in endless misstatements of truth. In one example, his stumblebum conduct had led the commander to make this famous oration:

THE PRESIDENT (3/4/25): We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.  Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.

It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.  I don’t know any of them.  I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly.  

(LAUGHTER) 

3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 

3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139.

3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.

And money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now. 

In fact, Pam [Bondi], good luck.  Good luck.  You’re going to find it.

But a lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid, and nobody does—and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.

1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159.  And over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.  

We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.]. 

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age—

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Joe Biden!  

(LAUGHTER)

THE PRESIDENT: —more than 100 years older than our country. 

But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. 

By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families. 

 (APPLAUSE) 

Are we still supposed to believe that those insinuations and claims were true? Later in the session with Baier, another associate made a very murky reference to those dramatic claims.

The earlier, dramatic claims had been rendered quite hard to parse. Baier never mentioned the earlier clams, or the apparent problems.

How do persons behave on the Fox News Channel? Baier's laconic semi-interview gave us one example.

That said, how do persons behave in the major journalistic and academic realms of our own Blue America? 

All in all, many persons in those realms behave as if they don't much care about such apparent gong-shows. Presentations like these tend to come and go, with little front-page reporting or assessment.

In the face of this widespread disinterest, persons like the commander and his lieutenant are thus free to indulge in such conduct.

In a very unusual bit if behavior, CBS News ran a fact-check! This fact-check has been cited nowhere. Simply put, elite persons who "went to the finest schools" don't much seem to care.

What is the truth about the Musk/Davis claim? In part because of Blue America's lazy elites, we can't necessarily tell you. 

For amusement purposes only, we can offer this early clip from this week's Conversation between Collins and Stephens.

The column appeared in yesterday's New York Times. At one point, the persons say this:

Nothing Ever Goes Wrong in Trump’s White House

[...]

Gail: We’re seeing trillions of reports from town hall meetings held by members of Congress where their outraged constituents complain about programs that were frozen at the behest of Elon Musk.

Musk, of course, is frequently rated the richest man in the world. More and more Americans are beginning to wonder about trusting their financial future to a guy who thinks 20 million dead people are collecting Social Security.

You’ve always been a let’s-spend-less conservative, right? Any hope you can offer up on this one?

Bret: I suspect historians will one day remember the Department of Government Efficiency the way we now remember lobotomies. It seemed, to some at the time, like a good idea.

Oof! The center-left Collins mocked the startling claims about Social Security claim; in his reply, the center-right Stephens unloosed an L-bomb. As the colloquy continued, Stephens stated an obvious point, then made an intriguing reference: 

Bret: The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t pare down spending or rethink the org chart of the federal bureaucracy or get rid of agencies or departments that may be doing more harm than good....

The problem is that competence and execution matter; that public input matters; that the federal government is not a tech company where you can afford to move fast and break things; and that you can’t afford to take a hammer to a problem that requires a scalpel without grievously injuring your patient. As for Musk, I’ve been calling him “the Donald of Silicon Valley” for years. 

Say what? The Donald of Silicon Valley? Luckily, Stephens provided a link to a column from 2018. Headline included, here's the way that column started:

Elon Musk, the Donald of Silicon Valley

He is prone to unhinged Twitter eruptions. He can’t handle criticism. He scolds the news media for its purported dishonesty and threatens to create a Soviet-like apparatus to keep tabs on it. He suckers people to fork over cash in exchange for promises he hasn’t kept. He’s a billionaire whose business flirts with bankruptcy. He’s sold himself as an establishment-crushing iconoclast when he’s really little more than an unusually accomplished B.S. artist. His legions of devotees are fanatics and, let’s face it, a bit stupid.

I speak of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.

[...]

[Tesla] has rarely turned a profit in its nearly 15-year existence. Senior executives are fleeing like it’s an exploding Pinto, and the company is in an ugly fight with the National Transportation Safety Board. It burns through cash at a rate of $7,430 a minute, according to Bloomberg. It has failed to meet production targets for its $35,000 Model 3, for which more than 400,000 people have already put down $1,000 deposits, and on which the company’s fortunes largely rest.

Also, the car is a lemon. Like the old borscht belt joke, the food is lousy and the portions are so small.

Rightly or wrongly, Stephens had Musk pegged as a major BS-artist even in 2018. The column continued from there. 

For the record, we don't know if Stephens' mockery of the quality of the Tesla was accurate back then. We don't know if his portrait has held up over time. 

We were intrigued to see that the Stephens had been mocking this display rack for cheeseheads and 3-year-old kids even way back then. 

We'll summarize today's findings, then leave you with a question:

Persons on the Fox News Channel often say the darndest things. They may also stage Potemkin interviews with the world's richest apparent human.

Also, persons within Blue America's elites may not much seem to care. 

CBS News conducted a substantial fact-check of the latest remarkable claim. Other big orgs didn't. Nor did the CBS effort produce a bit of discussion. Over here in Blue America, our own persons don't seem to care!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but these are some of the persons shaping our D-minus discourse. That said, could something be "wrong' with Elon Musk?

If so, that would be a tragic loss of human potential. Tomorrow, the ketamine files.

Tomorrow: Three major news orgs published reports. Can you guess what happened next?

TUESDAY: As Leavitt returns to her favorite word...

TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2025

...Morning Joe turns to sports: It's beginning to seem like Karoline Leavitt's favorite word. That favorite word would be "vicious."

In this report for Mediaite, Ahmad Austin transcribes a lengthy exchange involving the person who was shipped to El Salvador through an "administrative error." For background, see this morning's report.

At issue was a basic question:

Why had this person been shipped away, in spite of a six-year-old court order forbidding any such action? According to Leavitt, the answer wasn't real hard to explain.

According to Leavitt, the person in question "was an MS-13 ringleader" and "was also engaged in human trafficking." Not only that, he "is an illegal criminal who broke our nation’s immigration laws."

As she continued, she said that the person in question "is a leader in the brutal MS-13 gang and is involved in human trafficking." After that, she implied that he's "a foreign terrorist" and "an illegal criminal."

As with everything else, it's possible that those claims are true. That said, it's also possible that those claims are false. 

Earlier, Leavitt had said "there is a lot of evidence" that the person in support of the claim that the person in question is "a convicted gang member: (Jeff Zeleny's term). She also said that she "saw the evidence this morning."

We're not sure what a "convicted gang member" is, but once that matter has been settled, the general thrust of Leavitt's claim could, of course, always be true. Or then again, possibly not. 

Whatever!

After Leavitt's lengthy denunciation of the person in question, Nancy Cordes (CBS News) asked the follow-up question shown below. When she did, this exchange occurred:

CORDES: But a judge ordered that he should remain in this country. So are you saying that it is OK to ignore a judge’s ruling if you don’t like it?

LEAVITT: Who does that judge work for?

CORDES: He’s an immigration judge.

LEAVITT: It was an immigration judge who works for the Department of Justice at the direction of the Attorney General of the United States, whose name is Pam Bondi, who has committed to eradicating MS-13 from our nation’s interior.

And let me tell you why we’ve made this commitment. MS-13, may I remind each and every one of you, is a brutal and vicious gang. They raped and strangled a 20-year-old autistic woman to death in Maryland. They hacked four people to death with machetes in a park on Long Island. They have kidnapped, sexually tortured, and shot a teenage girl in Texas after she insulted them—allegedly—killed and mutilated a 17-year-old girl in Virginia— stabbing him 16 times and cutting off his hands. 

They beheaded and cut out the heart of a man in Washington, D.C. They raped and murdered a 13-year-old girl in California. They sex trafficked a slew of young girls, including one who was just 12 years old; raped an 11-year-old girl in Brooklyn while her brother was in the room; sex trafficked a 13-year-old in Maryland and Virginia—miles away from this White House—even beating her 26 times on her backside with a baseball bat; pressured homeless New Yorkers to undergo unnecessary surgeries, such as spinal fusion, in order to bolster their fraudulent lawsuits.

These are vicious criminals. This is a vicious gang, and I wish that the media would spend just a second of the same time you have spent trying to litigate each and every individual of this gang who has been deported from our country as the innocent Americans whose lives have been lost at the hands of these brutal criminals. We maintain our position and very strongly so.

Just like that, the press spokesperson had returned to her litany of claims.

Full disclosure! By all accounts, MS-13 is indeed a vicious gang. Leavitt kept saying "vicious / vicious," but she never spoke to the question(s) at hand:

Is it true that the person in question was involved in any of the vicious crimes she described? Has he been involved in any crimes? Indeed, is it true that the person in question was or is a member of MS-13 at all? 

Also, what about that judge's order? Would it be OK to disregard something like that?

Leavitt kept saying "vicious / vicious," but she didn't describe the evidence she said he had seen. Speaking her famous "fluent Trump," she kept insulting and scolding the journalists while failing to answer their blindingly obvious questions. 

With respect to the immigration judge in question, his ruling was issued during President Trump's first term in office. Pam Bondi wasn't the AG then. Here's the way the report in "the failing Atlantic" described the circumstances:

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

[...]

Court filings show that Abrego Garcia came to the United States at age 16 in 2011 after fleeing gang threats in his native El Salvador. In 2019 he received a form of protected legal status known as “withholding of removal” from a U.S. immigration judge who found he would likely be targeted by gangs if deported back.

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization.

[His lawyer] said that those charges are false, and that the gang label stems from a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member.

Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime, but he was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the arrest to face deportation. In those proceedings, the government claimed that a reliable informant had identified him as a ranking member of MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his family hired an attorney and fought the government’s attempt to deport him. He received “withholding of removal” six months later, a protected status.

It is not a path to permanent U.S. residency, but it means the government won’t deport him back to his home country, because he’s more likely than not to face harm there.

According to "the failing Atlantic," so goes the latest (highly complex) story. That said, little complexity will be displayed by those who are currently speaking fluent Trump.  As with earlier cultural revolutions, it simply isn't allowed.

Is the person in question a "vicious criminal?" Everything is always possible. We have no ultimate way of knowing the answer to that question.

That said, does Leavitt know the answer to that question? We have no way of knowing that either, but we'd guess that the odds are quite poor.

Meanwhile, is Morning Joe turning itself into ESPN 3? We thought today's first hour was very strange, as was yesterday's first hour.

Please don't ask us for the details. When the zone is being flooded, keeping up is surpassingly hard.

To watch the various exchanges with Leavitt on this topic, click here for the C-Span videotape, then skip ahead to 9:30. The true belief goes on and on, as does the use of a favorite word.

Karoline Leavitt truly believes, in the deepest possible way.  Can a nation hope to endure in the face of such unblinking certainty?

PERSONS: The kinds of persons who people Fox News!

TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2025

Also, with this report it starts: With this report from CNN—with this report, it starts:

Trump administration concedes Maryland father from El Salvador was mistakenly deported and sent to mega prison

The Trump administration conceded in a court filing Monday that it mistakenly deported a Maryland father to El Salvador “because of an administrative error” and argued it could not return him because he’s now in Salvadoran custody.

The filing stems from a lawsuit over the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who in 2019 was granted protected status by an immigration judge, prohibiting the federal government from sending him to El Salvador.

The filing, first reported by The Atlantic, appears to mark the first time the administration has admitted an error related to its recent deportation flights to El Salvador, which are now at the center of a fraught legal battle.

“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the Trump administration filing states.

Abrego Garcia, who attorneys say fled gang violence in El Salvador more than a decade ago, had been identified by his wife in a photo of detainees entering intake at El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT.

[...]

The administration argued that it cannot bring back Abrego Garcia because he’s in Salvadoran custody and knocked down concerns that he’s likely to be tortured or killed in CECOT. 

According to the administration, it isn't likely that Abrego Garcia will be tortured or killed!

With that report, it starts. It was first reported by The Atlantic—by the arch purveyor of fake news. Or so it was said by certain persons as recently as last week.

A wide array of persons—a wide array of types of persons—have been involved in the invention of the broken national discourse under which the American experiment, such as it was, now struggles to stay afloat. With that report from CNN, via The Atlantic, one part of this story now starts.

(During today's 6 o'clock hour, this report wasn't mentioned on Morning Joe, which seems to be turning into an offshoot of ESPN. From 6:30 to 7, it was nothing but sports. This afternoon, we'll offer more on this phenomenon.)

With that report, it starts! Yesterday, we mentioned some of the types of persons who have helped us reach our degraded state. We mentioned the persons you might see on the Fox News Channel. We also mentioned what you might call The Silence of the Logicians.

There's more to say about the persons in that latter group, and about their colleagues who serve as professors of ethics. For today, let's start with the kinds of persons you could have seen yesterday on the most-watched TV show in the entire "cable news" firmament.

What kinds of persons are hired by the Fox News Channel to perform on The Five, that most-watched "cable news" show? At one point during yesterday's sho, the children were pretending to discuss the return of the stranded astronauts. 

Earlier yesterday, the astronauts had been interviewed by the Fox News Channel's Bill hemmer. During the pseudo-discussion on The Five, the person we've long described as the silliest child in the history of TV news chimed in with this typical numb-nut remark:

WATTERS (3/31/25): Hemmer’s a great interviewer, but he whiffed. 

GUTFELD: Ha!

WATTERS: The main question that everybody wanted asked was, "Did they hook up?"— 

PAVLICH: Oh my gosh.

WATTERS: —and he just left it hanging out there. I hope there’s a part two to this interview, Hemmer, because next time I see you I’m going to slap you silly.

GUTFELD: Mmmm.

In fairness, that's what ownership wants him to do on this TV program. Still, that's what the silliest child in the firmament said. He's 47 years old. 

Needless to say, it didn't stop there. The persons on this corporate messaging channel will naturally move on to such comments as these. We'll offer full context below:

WATTERS (continuing directly): Also, the guy [the male astronaut] said he was "stranded but not forgotten?" Come on! Jessica, he was stranded. And now we have confirmation.

JUDGE JEANNINE: And you want to know why he was stranded?

TARLOV (sarcastically): Because Biden's terrible.

JUDGE JEANNINE: Because Biden declined to bring him back. And therein lies the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration. An innovator who's able to bring them back from space.

First, you get the silly stuff. After that, it's the propaganda.

At issue was a recurrent claim by President Trump and Elon Musk, in which President Biden had refused to bring the astronauts back last fall for pre-election political reasons. 

By now, this claim has become an article of faith among the kinds of person who get hired to perform on Fox News Channel programs. For that reason, it was inevitable:

After the twaddle from the silliest child, the resident loudmouth stepped in, which liberal punching bag Jessica Tarlov unerringly calling her shot.

Has any evidence ever been offered in support of this mandated claim? The simple answer would be no, but we can link you to a pair of voluminous fact checks. 

One fact-check comes from NPR, the other from FactCheck.org. Full disclosure:

According to persons on Fox News programs, each site is sunk in "fake news," like the site which first reported the "administrative error" to which the Trump administration has now copped. 

That said, the detailed fact-check from NPR appeared on March 12. It appeared beneath this headline:

NASA's latest space launch: 'Stranded' astronauts and messy politics

The detailed report from FactCheck.org appeared on March 18. One passage includes a typical bit of behavior from one of the persons we cited in yesterday's report:

The Facts Behind the Delayed Return of U.S. Astronauts

[...]

In response to Musk’s claims, several astronauts took to X to refute the idea that the astronauts were purposefully abandoned. Andreas Mogensen, a former SpaceX astronaut from Denmark, posted: “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” 

In response to Mogensen, Elon replied: “You are fully retarded. SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

Mogensen responded by stating, “Elon, I have long admired you and what you have accomplished, especially at SpaceX and Tesla. You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September. Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September.”

When someone challenged what Musk had said, he replied in a typical way. The person in question was "fully retarded," the 53-year-old person said.

For the persons employed by the Fox News Channel, there will rarely be any doubt about such messaging matters. Silly piddle from persons like Watters will quickly be followed to mandated claims from the likes of Judge Jeannine Pirro.

Sadly, it gets worse. At least for those who watch CNN, we now have the first report of an acknowledged "administrative error," in which a person was shipped to a Central American gulag from which he can't be returned.

Of one thing you can be fairly certain. The persons who people Fox News Channel TV shows will not darken their viewers' spotless minds by focusing on this matter.

Below, we'll offer a gruesome example below of the way these persons do respond to matters of this general type. First, consider something else which happened yesterday on The Five.

Tarlov is cast as the liberal punching bag who presence on this TV show lends it a touch of frisson. Harold Ford, her counterpart, has almost become more pro-Trump than the four officially pro-Trump hosts. But when Tarlov appears on the program, viewers may occasionally be forced to to listen to such statements as this.

Tarlov was discussing a different possible error. We'll offer some context below:

TARLOV: You can't take away people's due process like that, and I— 

Again, I don't trust the El Salvadorean government to be making sure that they are not torturing people—that they're vetting them properly. They need to be vetted on this side [in the United States, before they're shipped away].

We don't understand the logic of some of that. Once the people have been "vetted properly," is it OK if they get tortured?

Some of that didn't quite parse. But according to Tarlov, the people in question need to be vetted properly—should be afforded due process—before they're shipped away to a place from which they may never return.

That seems to make a fairly obvious type of sense. For that reason, group interruption was imminent.

In the course of this discussion, Tarlov was referring to a case we'd never heard of before—a case involving a gay barber. To watch the full discussion, you can start by clicking here. 

But by the time of the remark by Tarlov posted above, the other four persons had heard enough. A classic group interruption occurred, as routinely occurs happens Tarlov has started to establish a blindingly obvious point:

JUDGE JEANNINE (continuing from above; interrupting): Why—why do the Democrats always say, "This could happen?"

TARLOV: It did happen! It was not— It's didn't "could happen." It did—

JUDGE JEANNINE: They were torturing him?

TARLOV:  Did you watch the video?

JUDGE JEANNINE: Torturing?

TARLOV: Yeah. Do you, do you— 

Time magazine was there when the gay barber from Venezuela, who had a crown tattoo which said "Mom," was being processed coming into the El—

"Did you watch the video?" The question answers itself! At any rate, by now, it was time to interrupt Tarlov again! Enter the silliest child:

WATTERS (continuing directly; interrupting):  Jessica—

TARLOV: Oh, am I boring you again? I'm sorry.

WATTERS: No, but you've been talking about this gay barber from El Salvador with some stupid tattoo for weeks. [Jokingly] Weeks, Jessica!

GUTFELD: Yeah! Come on!

WATTERS: It's just a gay barber.

GUTFELD: He's not into you!

It's just a gay barber, the person said. Such comments are common from persons on Fox. And then, up jumped Greg Gutfeld.

With that, the towel-snapping began; the attempt at discussion ended. For the record, the other four persons on The Five routinely behave this way when Tarlov starts making a point. 

On other programs on this "news channel," no such examples of WrongThink will ever occur in the first place. 

These are among the array of persons who populate the Fox News Channel. The persons who people the news orgs of Blue America have agreed that this disordered behavior must never be reported or discussed. 

The professors of logic stay tucked away, continuing their discussions of such topics as "the position that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name," but also of such topics as "the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities."

In such ways, persons interact, or choose not to, thereby creating our imitation of a public discourse. 

In closing, we'll show you what one more person did when he played tape of the recent "arrest" of a young woman at Tufts by six (6) men posing for the cameras in masks, with the help of their unamarked cars.

The person in question was Brian Kilmeade. Inevitably, we think of the arrest of Anne Frank when we see conduct like his.

You can see his conduct starting here as he plays sound-enhanced videotape of the "arrest" on last Sunday night's Fox News Channel show, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade. Inevitably, we think of the person(s) who arrested Anne Frank. Such persons are also among us.

Before the week is done, we'll discuss Kilmeade's enthusiasm about what he saw on that tape. For today, we'll simply invite you to watch it.

That said, what of the prominent person who said the Danish astronaut was "fully retarded?" 

It's as we said in yesterday's report. Last Friday, he made a rather startling claim on the Fox News Channel. Tomorrow, we'll show you what happened, and what didn't happen, when CBS News did a fact-check of his remarkable claim.

These are the persons creating our imitation of a discourse. Can any nation so burdened expect to survive—expect to "long endure?"

In last night's report, it finally started! Mistakenly, a man has been shipped into the gulag. Relevant persons say he isn't likely to be tortured or killed, but also that there's no apparent way to get him back.

This morning, CNN was discussing the report. On MSNBC, the persons who people Morning Joe spent an entire half hour chatting instead about sports!

There's a new book about Tiger Woods. The persons burned time about that!

Tomorrow: CBS News fact-checks Musk

MONDAY: When is a "deportation" something else?

MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2025

Uninquiring minds may not want to know: According to a new report in Mediaite, there she went again.

"Shame on you," the youngster said—though we wouldn't say that she "shouted." The report begins in the manner shown, and it provides the videotape:

‘Shame on You!’ Karoline Leavitt Scolds Reporter Over Question About White House’s Own Deportation Guidance

Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent for The Independent, went back and forth with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Monday about criteria DHS uses to classify illegal migrants as foreign combatants.

Leavitt shouted, “Shame on you!” at Feinberg at one point after he noted some migrants can be classified as members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua and become eligible for deportation to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act over symbols in their tattoos and their clothing.

The White House press secretary disagreed with Feinberg, who cited the federal government’s own documents on the matter.

Feinberg said, “You can get classified [as Tren de Aragua] by simply having certain symbols in your tattoos and wearing certain streetwear brands. That alone is enough to get someone classified as TDA and sent to El Salvador.”

Leavitt fired back, “That’s not true, actually, Andrew.”

The report continues from there. It includes a document which described what we would regard as the mind-boggling way a foreign national can acquire the eight "points" which get him classified as a Tren de Aragua gang member.

We'd never seen the criteria for "deportation to El Salvador" laid out that way. The criteria strike us as something out of a dystopian cartoon—but that's not this point of this post.

Once again, our basic question today would be this:

Why is this shipping of people to El Salvador being referred to as a "deportation?"

In a normal use of that term, this is what would typically happen, at least in the modern context:

A foreign national would be returned to his country of origin—to his country of citizenship.  What happens after he arrives there (in most cases, nothing) would be up to the local authorities.

That isn't what's happening with the people who are being shipped to El Salvador. In this case, they're being shipped to a nation which isn't their country of origin—and they're being shipped there for immediate imprisonment.

Should this act of rendition by referred to as a "deportation?" In the interest of accurate description, we'd be inclined to look for a different word. 

Along the way, we'd wonder on what legal authority the federal government is rendering people into a brutal foreign prison system without any attempt at establishing that the person in question has committed some sort of crime. 

What's the legal authority on which this somewhat peculiar practice is being conducted? We've seen no one ask.

Meanwhile, what's in a word? On last Thursday night's All In, Chris Hayes eschewed the word "prison" in discussing these renditions. He opted for "gulag" instead. 

(To see him do so, click here.)

That's the word we'd been using! At the end of the segment, Hayes was praised by a guest for his choice of words. That guest was Noah Lanard of Mother Jones, co-author of this report:

“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”
The Trump administration sent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s most infamous prison. Their families are looking for answers.

What's in a word? "It's closer to a factory farm than to a prison," Lenard then said. Almost surely, some of the people shipped to that "infamous prison" weren't gang members at all. 

They were shipped away to a brutal place, possibly never to return. However we might think of this, this isn't some simple, recognizable act of "deportation."

Almost surely, some of those people weren't gang members at all! Plainly, Karoline Leavitt doesn't seem to be up to the task of caring about such possibilities. 

To her, they're all "vicious" gang members, no further questions asked. In fairness, that may be the best she can do at this point in her life.

The recent "arrest" of the student at Tufts made us think of the arrest of Anne Frank. It sent us back to Francine Prose's remarkable book about that world-famous, cosmic breakdown in human behavior.

(Francine Prose: Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. 2009.)

We thought of the person(s) who arrested Anne Frank as we saw the Tufts student taken away. In every population, there are people who are willing to do such things, possibly even eager. 

That's simply the way our species is built. In our morning reports, we'll arrive at that topic by the end of the week.

PERSONS: Hotep Jesus, Professor Quine, Musk?

MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2025

These are the persons we've chosen: We'll start with a callback to Hotep Jesus. As we noted on Saturday, he's someone the Fox News Channel pays to people one of its "cable news" programs.

To our eye, Hotep Jesus is a smiling, genial presence when he appears on the primetime Gutfeld! "cable news" program. 

On the other hand, he apparently believes that Africans built boats and sailed to the Americas long before Columbus. He apparently believes that the people we think of as "native Americans" were actually the descendants of those early African sailors.

As we noted on Saturday, the apparent beliefs continue along from there. But so it goes on the Gutfeld! show, where undisguised misogyny rules the roost and group propaganda is constant. 

(This happens each night on the Fox News Channel without a word from Blue America's major news organs. The New York Times has a "comedy critic," but he will never be asked to report the way D-list comedians and other flyweights are used on this primetime "news" program.)

When he appears on the Gutfeld! show, Hotep Jesus becomes one of the principals within our prevailing news culture. For today, let's quickly consider a few other persons who have helped shape the perilous journalistic / academic / intellectual state we Americans find ourselves in. 

We'll try to touch an array of bases. We'll end with Elon Musk.

Willard Van Orman Quine

At this point, we'll journey to the mountaintop of high academia. The leading authority on Professor Quine—a good, decent person—starts its lengthy profile as shown:

Willard Van Orman Quine 

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century." He was the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.

Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. He was famous for his position that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In the philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities....[Professor Quine] developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input."

And so on, at length, from there. 

Friend, how about it? Do you believe in "the reality of mathematical entities?" Possibly more to the point, do you have any idea what some such claim might even mean?

Full disclosure! Long ago and far away, we took Deductive Logic from Professor Quine. In that same street-fighting year, we also took Philosophy of Science from Professor Putnam.

Each of these men was a good, decent person. Each was considered an academic giant.

As the leading authority notes, Professor Quine's most famous book was, and is, Word and Object. Once again, the leading authority speaks:

Word and Object

Word and Object is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in From a Logical Point of View (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments, such as his attack in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" on the analytic–synthetic distinction. The thought experiment of radical translation and the accompanying notion of indeterminacy of translation are original to Word and Object, which is Quine's most famous book.

Quine emphasizes his naturalism, the doctrine that philosophy should be pursued as part of natural science. He argues in favor of naturalizing epistemology, physicalism as against phenomenalism and mind-body dualism, and extensionality as against intensionality. 

The thumbnail continues from there. You may not know what the bulk of that overview means. Perhaps to help you understand why, here are the first two paragraphs of this famous book's Preface:

Preface

Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively acquired cues as to what to say and when. Hence there is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men's dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations. An effect of recognizing this limitation is that the enterprise of translation is found to be involved in a certain systematic indeterminacy; and his is the main theme of Chapter II.

The indeterminacy of translation invests even the question what object to construe a term as true of. Studies of the semantics of reference consequently turn out to mke sense only when directed upon substantially our language, from within. But we do remain free to reflect, thus parochially, on the development and structure of our own referential apparatus, and this I do in ensuing chapters. In so doing one encounters various anomalies and conflicts that are  implicit in this apparatus (Chapter IV), and is moved to adopt remedies in the spirit of modern logic (Chapters V and VI). Clarity also is perhaps gained on what we do when we impute existence, and what considerations may best guide such decisions; thus Chapter VII.

According to that passage, Professor Quine believed "there is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men's dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations," and other things besides.

The fact that he is said to have believed such things may help explain why you've never heard of Professor Quine, or of any influence his work ever had on our now-broken national discourse.

Professor Quine was one of the past century's most celebrated logicians. Unlike Hotep Jesus, he worked at the highest end of mainstream academic authority.

Having said that, we'll ask you this, if only for today:

We'll ask you if any of his somewhat abstruse formulations represent an actual improvement on the work of Hotep Jesus.

For today, we'll leave this section with this: If this is the kind of help the society gets from its greatest logicians, is it really surprising that this flailing nation's ship of state seems to be running aground?

Books about the Biden years:

We've cited the work of a leading hotep, and the work of a leading logician. Now, we move to a pair of forthcoming books by mainstream journalists—books about certain events of the past four years.

These books make certain allegations about persons in the political realm. The books also seem to imply certain things about the work of persons in the field of mainstream journalism.

What happened in the past four years—in the years which led to the election of Candidate Trump last fall? Tapper and Thompson were first out of the gate concerning one possible answer. From CNN, here's a quick overview of their forthcoming book:

New book on Biden by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reports a ‘cover-up’ about his decline

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson decided to co-author a book about what had led the Democratic party to defeat, with a focus on former President Joe Biden.

The deeply sourced reporters found what they call a “cover-up” of the former president’s “serious decline.”

The resulting book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is coming out on May 20. The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the project on Wednesday.

“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents,” Penguin said in a press release.

Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations,” the press release stated.

CNN's thumbnail continues from there. Is it possible that this welter of claims made in this book are actually true? Below, you see the start of a report from The Guardian about a second forthcoming book, this one by Allen and Parnas:

Democrats staged ‘hush-hush talks’ in 2023 for Biden to withdraw from race, says book
New book Fight also reports Harris aides ‘strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office’

Democratic officials staged “hush-hush talks” to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book.

Citing two unnamed sources, authors Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s account adds another twist to the torturous saga over the then president’s age and fitness that was not resolved until a disastrous debate against Donald Trump precipitated his exit in July 2024.

More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.

Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.

Could such claims be true? Yes, they certainly could be.

At any rate, there are now two books which advance such claims. These claims ask us to ponder the work of many important persons within the Democratic Party. Inevitably, the claims might also suggest that we might ponder the working of persons within the mainstream press. 

Is it possible that some such persons were involved in "a cover-up" of President Biden's alleged condition? That accusation is constantly made on the Fox News Channel. Could it possibly be that this accusation has merit? 

We've now mentioned the work of a person from the hotep subculture—a person who plays a role in "cable news."  We've cited the work of a very major academic—a professor of logic, no less.

We've asked about various persons within the Democratic Party and within the mainstream press. Quickly, let's cite another person who is now playing a major role in shaping the current American discourse, such as that swamp creature is.

Elon Musk

For today, we'll refer to last Friday's edition of the Fox News Channel's Special Report, in which Elon Musk (and seven associates) were subjected to something resembling an interview by Bret Baier.

(To watch the full program, click here.)

Full disclosure! Elon Musk is widely described as the world's richest person. As for Baier, was he once the owner of the Washington area's most expensive estate?

To this day, we can't explain this (wholly undiscussed) report in The Washingtonian. It appeared in October 2023:

Fox News’s Bret Baier Lists DC Home for $32 Million—a Potential Record
If it goes for the listing price, it'll be the most expensive DC sale of all time.

A potentially record-setting DC home has just gone on the market: Fox News’s Bret Baier and his wife, Amy, are listing their French chateau-style Berkley home for $31.9 million, reports The Wall Street Journal. If it goes for asking price, it’ll be the most expensive residential sale in DC history. The listing agent is Daniel Heider of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty.

The 16,250-square-foot estate was completed last year and sits on 1.47 acres, with five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and two half-baths. Other touches include a custom bar in the living room with a floor-to-ceiling wine display; a primary suite with two primary baths and heated floors; a home gym; a cinema; a spa; a two-story, indoor sports court; and a golf simulator. Throughout the gated property, you’ll also find a paved motor court with a fountain, tiered gardens, a 56-foot-long heated pool, a chipping and putting green, and two three-car garages.

There's nothing automatically wrong with owning DC's most expensive estate—and as The Washingtonian reported last December, when Baier finally unloaded the place, it sold for only $25 million.

For the record, look who bought it:

Bret Baier’s DC House Sells for Record $25 Million—in Cash
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary pick, buys the Foxhall estate as team Trump rolls into town.

The Trump bump has begun, at least when it comes to the area real-estate market. Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald CEO and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, has purchased the Foxhall house formerly owned by Fox News anchor Bret Baier and his wife, Amy, for $25 million, in an all-cash transaction. Which makes it the most expensive residential sale in DC history, topping the $24 million Robert Allbritton paid for the Bowie-Sevier house in Georgetown in 2007. The listing agent for the Foxhall house, Daniel Heider of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, told Washingtonian that he couldn’t comment on the purchase.

As members of the new administration start descending on DC, the ultra-luxury real estate market is poised for a surge in activity. Trump’s cabinet picks have a total net worth in excess of $14 billion—a number that rises to $450 billion if you include government efficiency co-czar Elon Musk and other advisers who will not require Senate confirmation.

Baier let the property go for a reduced purchase price.  By common agreement among all parties, reports like these in The Washingtonian generate zero discussion or comment.

Why in the world would Bret Baier have been living in the Washington area's most palatial crib? We have no idea; and nothing is automatically wrong with some such circumstance.

That said, on last Friday's Special Report, Baier devoted the entire program to a series of exchanges with Elon Musk and seven of his associates. Baier's second question, and Musk's answer, went exactly like this:

BAIER (3/28/25): For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. Just—we routinely encounter waste of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

You know, for example, like the simple survey that was—literally, a ten-question survey. You could do it with SurveyMonkey—it would cost about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.

BAIER: For just a survey?

MUSK: A billion dollars for a simple online survey, "Do you like the National Park?" And then, there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane.

Let's understand what Musk said.

Baier tossed a lazy softball at Musk. Musk then claimed that the federal government had paid "a billion dollars for a simple online survey" that should have cost something like $10,000.

Initially, Musk said that the government was being charged "almost a billion dollars" for the simple survey. Moments later, one of his aides said the precise figure was $830 million. 

Over the weekend, persons all over the Fox News Channel treated these representations as gospel.  That said, how much confidence do you have in the various things Musk says?

What kinds of persons simply assume that statements like these are accurate? Whatever the answer might be, persons like that crawl all over the Fox News Channel, echoing each other's statements morning, noon and night. The widespread absence of fact-checking suggests their presence elsewhere.

These are the persons who shape our badly failing discourse. We leave you today with a question:

Were we humans—persons like us—actually built for this work?

Tomorrow: CBS News and its fact check

Later this week: Eventually, we'll even mention the type of person who arrested Anne Frank, just 15 years old. 

Such persons are found in every human population. At long last, is it time for us to start reporting basic facts about who we actually are?