TV News LIES

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie.

Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.

So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian take-over. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezin concentration camp.

Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.

That is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction. I’m glad to have been informed about the heavy snow outside my window today and the local weather-travel advisory, but frankly, it’s snowed here before—so why is it leading the news?

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A Minnesota federal magistrate judge refused to sign a complaint charging independent journalist Don Lemon in connection with a protest inside a church in St. Paul on Sunday, multiple sources familiar with the proceedings told CBS News.

"The attorney general is enraged at the magistrate's decision," said a source familiar with the matter. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been in Minnesota for two days, as the Justice Department has sought to surge prosecutorial and law enforcement resources there.

A different source stressed that the process is not over, and the Justice Department could find other avenues to charge Lemon. 

The magistrate judge who declined to approve charges for Lemon was Douglas Micko, sources told CBS News. Micko previously worked as a federal public defender.

Lemon's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement Thursday that the magistrate's actions "confirm the nature of Don's First Amendment protected work this weekend in Minnesota as a reporter."

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In an apparent attempt to win back Donald Trump’s favour, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado told reporters she had “presented” her gold Nobel peace prize medal to the US president during a private meeting at the White House on Thursday.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Nicolás Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”, told reporters she had done so “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”. It was not immediately clear whether Trump had accepted the gift.

Trump later wrote his Truth Social platform: “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”

It is unclear if Trump retained the medal, and he did not post an image of it.

While Trump expressed gratitude to have been presented the medal he’s long pined for, the Nobel Peace Center has reiterated its rules of possession several times in recent days.

“Once a Nobel prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others,” Nobel organizers wrote in a 9 January press release. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”

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The top federal prosecutor on the Minnesota fraud case has reportedly resigned on Tuesday, the New York Times first reported. 

Joseph H. Thompson, the lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation into social services fraud in the state, served as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) reacted to the news on Tuesday, calling Thompson a “principled public servant” in a post on the social platform X. 

“Joe is a principled public servant who spent more than a decade achieving justice for Minnesotans. This is a huge loss for our state,” Walz wrote. “It’s also the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants.”

The Times reported that Thompson and five fellow federal prosecutors resigned over the DOJ’s attempts to investigate the wife of the woman killed by a federal officer last week and lack of interest in investigating the officer who shot her.

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As a neurologist, I care for some of society’s most vulnerable individuals — children with severe disabilities who are often mocked, dismissed or misunderstood. My career is rooted in supporting people with physical and cognitive differences, educating about empathy and respect for human diversity, and applying the principles of science and medicine to improve the lives of those facing challenges of one kind or another.

From that perspective, President Donald Trump’s public admonition of a female reporter in November — “Quiet, piggy” — was gut-wrenching and continues to resonate weeks later. To some, it was an offhand, albeit misogynistic, fat-shaming insult. To me, the remark instantly evoked Piggy, the vulnerable and marginalized character in William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” and revealed something far more troubling: a display of dominance, denigration and the subjugation of those deemed less worthy.

The rapid spread of the phrase across media platforms underscored a deeper danger — one that has only grown more unsettling as public displays of intimidation and condemnation increase. It is not just the cruelty of the words but the authority of the speaker, and the delight of many in his audience, that makes them so corrosive.

“Quiet, piggy” is not a joke. It is an illustration of how normalized bullying has become, and an affront to the people I care for and the values that guide my work.

Others have drawn parallels between “Lord of the Flies” and our political moment. In 2020, The New York Times published Jennifer Finney Boylan’s essay “President of the Flies,” in which she described feeling cast onto “some cruel and hostile strand ... where people with disabilities were mocked, immigrants ... were reviled, and grabbing women by their private parts was ... A-OK.”

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Ask anybody about the Jewish vote for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the election, and they’ll tell you he lost it badly. If they saw the news coverage, the headlines put a number on it: One-third went to Mamdani, and two-thirds went to his opponent Andrew Cuomo. To backers of Israel, the support for Mamdani was too high. To others, it was read as a sign that Mamdani was too divisive for the Democratic Party coalition—alienating large segments of New York City’s Jewish electorate.

On his first day as Mayor, Mamdani rescinded all executive orders issued by Eric Adams following his federal criminal indictment. This included revoking the Adams administration’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism, even as Mamdani maintained the newly-created Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.

Unsurprisingly, Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history, has routinely been accused of antisemitism from segments of the Democratic and Republican Party establishments, given his advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Regardless, the election results have been used to promote the narrative that Mamdani has little more than marginal support within the Jewish community. But an exit poll of Jewish voters that tells us nothing about their denomination or the wealth of their neighborhood might be missing crucial variables.

A closer block-by-block analysis, in fact, reveals an entirely different story. Whether a voter was Jewish or not turns out to have little to do with their preference for Mamdani or his opponent. Jewish voters, like New York City as a whole, were split between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his erstwhile opponent Andrew Cuomo based on culture, denomination, age, and income. Block-level results show that Jewish voters routinely voted in line with their neighbors.

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