The purpose of police Twitter accounts is to inform people about public safety. The purpose of passive voice is (often) to avoid responsibility. These don’t go together well. Today we examine how the Los Angeles Police used passives that twist the truth into bizarre shapes in describing police shootings. A correspondent brought to my attention…
Joe Biden mentioned unity nine times in his inauguration speech yesterday. Then he signed 17 executive orders undoing actions of President Trump. Is this unity? Representative Liz Cheney doesn’t think so. “We face significant challenges that require bipartisan responses,” she wrote in a statement. “Today’s Executive Orders reverse important policies and impose significant economic cost…
I was optimistic when President Trump won the election in 2016. I was hopeful that, as a nontraditional politician, he could accomplish things that conventional presidents never could. That was a mistake. There is nothing I’ve posted here in six years of blogging that I regret more than that post. It was naive and mostly…
Riots on the National Mall. National Guard troops shooting protestors. Broken windows at the White House. An assassination attempt. Violence at state capitals around the country. Attacks on an American embassy in a foreign country, or an American airbase, or an oil tanker, that require some sort of presidential response. Attacks on health workers at…
Last week, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed disappeared. After seeing the violence in the Capitol, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey decided that Trump’s feed was inciting violence and removed it. But Dorsey’s tweets explaining the ban were meandering and confusing. Let’s take a look at what Dorsey tweeted . . . and what he could have said…
I’m struck by how one psychological tendency — confirmation bias — is at the root of all the trends undermining our society. There is a solution: it’s called “farming for dissent.” Confirmation bias is “a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.” And as humans, we are all…
There’s something about that word “sedition” . . . something that stirred a memory deep in my past. If you recall the classic musical “Fiddler on the Roof” this may resonate for you. If not . . . well, you’ve missed something that might make sense of the current moment. A fiddler with the truth…
A tweet from last week said that Trump, once impeached, would lose his pension, travel allowance, secret service protection, and ability to run again. It got 193,000 retweets. And it’s quite wrong. Here’s the tweet, the contents of which circulated widely, not just on Twitter, but on other social networks: To start, Trump was already…
![Incomplete pass[ive]: Bill Belichick rejects the Presidential Medal of Freedom](https://bernoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/medal-of-freedom.jpg)
Donald Trump proposed to give New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Belichick’s statement declining the honor twists, turns, and lies down passively like a quarterback about to be sacked by the defense. A bit of background. Belichick is part of the holy trinity of New England football, along with…