#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Out of Control" The New Yorker, September 7, 2020.

"But the thesis of the Republican Convention was more extreme. Forces larger that the media, more various than the media, variously identified as socialists, anarchists, 'wild-eyed Marxists,' 'woketo-pians,' and 'globalization fanatics,' are gathering to bring down the country." "The notion that white Americans are in danger of being 'replaced' is a trope of the far right."

"Public-heath imperatives were suspect too. Senator Marsha Blackburn Tennessee said 'if the Democrats had their way they would keep you locked in your home until you become dependent on the government for everything. That sounds like Communist China to me!" "Social distancing measures weren't just misguided; the coronavirus was a convenient excuse to promote socialism."

#Hua Hsu, "Starving Artists," The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

"The vast majority of American artists are like DeMans  (the musician Venus), essentially freelancers, who generate little in the way of profits. According to a 2018 study conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, Music Cares, and the Princeton University Research Center, American musicians earned a medium income of twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their craft in the previous year." "Before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2013, it was estimated that forty-three per cent of artists lacked health insurance."

"Art in the wake of the Enlightenment, became a kind of secular religion, and, consequently, artists began viewing themselves as independent from the powerful or the holy." "The Internet's monopolization of leisure and the tech companies' passive attitude toward piracy gutted the traditional culture industry." "Today, seventy-seven per cent of music-industry revenue goes to the top one per cent of content producers." 

#Eric Tucker and Deb Riechmann, "US officials: Russia vs. Biden, China vs. Trump." The Albuquerque Journal, August 8, 2020.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats believe that the intelligence community has been withholding from the public specific intelligence information about the threats of foreign interference in American politics. Trump has routinely resisted the idea that the Kremlin favored him in 2016, but the intelligence assessment released [recently] indicates that unnamed Kremlin-linked actors are again working to boost [Trump's] candidacy on social media and Russian television."

#Amanda Petrusich, "Meeting the Moment," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

["Dixie"] "Its use as as a dating nickname for the Confederacy was popularized by 'I Wish I Was in Dixie Land,' a minstrel song published in 1860 and usually performed in blackface." "Dixie songs --which typically expressed nostalgia for the antebellum South -- continued to appear throughout the longtime framing of the word 'Dixie' (or any other paean to a South) that was reliant on slaves as a type of gaslighting."

ADDENDUM:

*Last month, President Trump said he would create a commission to push more "pro-American" history. He said that "left-wing rioting and mayhem was the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools."