New College/North Carolina: The Most Important Stories of The Day, Week, Month, Year
No doubt the rise in conspiracy thinking parallels the way we all get “news” from all over. Plenty of doubtful sources offer validity to any fantasy while the need to hang on to one narrative or another, no matter how absurd, grows in proportion to the stress of confusion all those sources cause.
A vicious cycle of distraction accelerates a nasty need to claim one’s beliefs beyond doubt, and then to wield that belief as a club.
And, lost in all this—or right at the top of it—is the impossibility of any story being important or lasting. (Only Trump, the emptiest of empty vessels lives on.)
Yet I don't think there is a more important news story for Americans than what has happened at New College and with the gerrymandering decision in North Carolina.
Teachers on campus are being told what to think and how to think as their college becomes an arm of a political party. The North Carolina Supreme Court also, now, serves only power and not the law. Those two events, as catastrophic to democracy as any you could imagine, are happening right now in America.
Or rather, they happened last week. Already gone from the news cycle, coronations, Clarence Thomas, and the Hunger Games Gala held at The Met replaced them.
I asked a wise friend how we battle back against all this. “Together,” she said.