Monday Readings: November 28

The holiday season is upon us.

Arun Gupta, in a piece for Raw Story, wonders why the media keeps letting Trump manipulate them. It’s obvious the president-elect is a liar, says Gupta, so maybe the media should dispense with their time-honored tradition of deference to power and do their jobs.

The media need to revive their role as an adversary to power, rather than a mouthpiece, and even more important to base their coverage on the reality that Trump has not changed.

The starting point is everything Trump does as president, as he did during the entire campaign and his life for that matter, is a cocktail of falsehoods, deception, nepotism, and graft. The Times gets one thing right when it says Trump’s transition phase is “an exercise in conspicuous self-promotion and carefully choreographed branding.” Most of the time the media get it wrong, however. They are eating up the images of his New Jersey golf club with its prime ministerial-style entrance serving as a catwalk for the pageant of thugs, opportunists, and autocrats seeking appointments and favors.

Katie McDonough looks at a core group of Trump supporters for Fusion: white women. McDonough argues that if you’re surprised white women voted for Trump, that’s your mistake_ it was never going to be any other way.

A majority of white women have supported the Republican candidate in nearly every election since 1952. (The most recent exception was 20 years ago when 52% of white women supported Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.) From Goldwater Girls in 1964 to the 14-point margin Mitt Romney held among white women in 2012, this is a voting bloc that, for more than half a century, has shored up its identity in whiteness, not gender. “This election is similar to a lot of previous elections in that…partisan identification obviously guided people’s votes,” Ronnee Schreiber, the chair of the department of political science at San Diego State University, told me over the phone. “So the gender gap, and white women voting for the Republican Party, is completely consistent.”

Trump frequently touts his support among the military, but as Hamilton Nolan found out, that support is not universal. Nolan put out a call for government employees to contact him at Deadspin’s The Concourse after the election and the results have been fascinating. Here, a soldier of color wonders how he can serve under a white nationalist.

To be honest, I can’t look at myself in the mirror while being a black man working for a white supremacist. I know that responsible logic says to stick it out for the sake of my young family, but this isn’t Jeb Bush or Romney winning the election. This is different. I think that this is closer to 1937 Germany than anything else.

And Trump is having trouble finding musicians willing to play at his inauguration. Vulture reports that Elton John is not interested, despite a recent report suggesting he was.

After a staffer on Trump’s transition team seemingly decided to convince Elton John to play at the upcoming inauguration as part of a pro-LGBTQ stance by announcing the news as if it were already a done deal, John has reacted with a hard pass. On Wednesday, his reps swiftly denied that John will have anything to do with Trump’s big day.

(Before you think that Elton John is taking a principled stand, it’s probably to do with Trump’s global unpopularity — Elton John happily played Rush Limbaugh’s wedding a few years ago)

Finally, Charlie Jane Anders looks at why aliens are represented as humans in popular fiction — and examines how extraterrestrial life could evolve as humans — at io9.

Stephen Jay Gould claims that life that evolved elsewhere would look totally different from us — and in fact, if you “reran the tape” from the beginning of life on Earth, you wouldn’t end up with humans on this planet either. The emergence of humanoids on Earth is a totally random event that was a fluke, even with the exact conditions that we arose from.

But let’s say that we do meet aliens, and they turn out to be bipeds with a roughly human-like shape… how do we explain that?

See you Tuesday.