Reading List: December 10, 2016

Saturday- Saturday, Saturday.

What is fake news? Adam Johnson examines the phenomenon for The Nation. Not only is the term undefined, Johnson says, but the implications of all this attention may be far-reaching.

This water muddying isn’t happening in a vacuum either. Those wanting to proceed with plans to curate and monitor information online — a long held impulse of all governments — are using the specter of “fake news” as a PR bludgeon to justify these broader efforts. On November 29, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius relayed that the US State Department was working on plans to protect “the truth,” including floating the idea of a “global ombudsman for information.” BuzzFeed reported that Congress, in the context of combating Russian fake news, will soon bring back the Cold War–era Active Measures Working Group, originally set up in concert with the CIA and the Defense Department to combat Soviet disinformation.

Nazi Dork Richard Spencer was confronted by Rabbi Matt Rosenberg in Texas. Spencer’s remarks caught Rosenberg by surprise when the white supremacist made the connection between his views and Zionism, Forward reports.

“My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Rosenberg said. “Will you sit town and learn Torah with me, and learn love?”

Spencer declined the invitation, but used it as an opportunity to suggest that the objectives of Zionism and Jewish continuity were close to his own goals for white people.

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” Spencer said. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

And Tulsi Gabbard receives another in-depth and thus not-so-complimentary profile, this time from Ashley Smith at The Socialist Worker.

The Hill reports that Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and former head of the hard-right Breitbart News, set up Gabbard’s job interview. The Hill quoted sources saying that Bannon “loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her. Wants to work with her on everything. She would fit perfectly too [inside the administration]. She gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff.”

This isn’t a bizarre exception, either. Gabbard’s long association with right-wingers led the Washington Post to dub her the “Democrat that the Republicans love and the DNC can’t control.”

I’ll have some long reads for ya tomorrow.