I’m honored today to see that Newsday published my letter to the editor about Tucker Carlson’s recent misinformation about the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. It’s the very last letter in today’s Letters page; you can find it right here.
Newsday is America’s ninth-largest newspaper, and the third-largest in New York State. Its Sunday circulation is just under a half million people.
If you shot 41,000 hours of video of Germany invading Poland in 1939, you could select out clips of German soldiers walking along without firing their weapons.
You could claim they entered the country as peaceful tourists — and that the nefarious forces of the oppressive Polish government had orchestrated a lie.
There’s a catch, though. The only people who would believe you would be those who already sympathized with the Nazis.
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and the violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
— internal message to officers from the U.S. Capitol Police about Tucker Carlson’s attempt to whitewash the January 6th insurrection
But this hardly matters. The people who are likely to believe Tucker Carlson will simply believe whatever they want anyway. They just want their self-vindicating fantasy articulated by a speaker they “trust.”
Recall, please, that this is the same crowd that regularly excoriates the rest of us for being taken in by “fake news.”
I was saddened this morning to learn of a terrible loss to the independent literature community. Poet and publisher Robert Hansen passed away from a pulmonary embolism in November.
I first worked with Robert in 2017, when he was kind enough to print some of my poems and microfiction in mini-book format with Poems-for-All. (Robert’s unique matchbook-sized mini-books published short literature in a way that allowed writers to “scatter them like seeds,” sharing their work with friends and strangers alike. He was a truly gifted graphic designer as well, and the covers he created were always perfect.)
Robert was a man with whom it was always a pleasure to interact. He was a sublimely gracious person who was always generous with his time, and he took obvious pleasure in encouraging and supporting creative people.
His loss is a great one to the writers who were lucky enough to work with him. I can only imagine it is immeasurably more so to the people who knew him best.
Q: Cite an example of an observation and an empirical conclusion to verify a claim.
A: They say The Heart of Rock and Roll is still beating — and from what I’ve seen I believe ’em.
“Claytor Memorial Clinic.”
If this doesn’t house a secret laboratory for the Umbrella Corporation, then I’m going to be very disappointed.
March 2023.
Remember that buddy of mine who tried otter a couple of weeks ago? He’s cooking with chicken claws tonight.
I don’t mean that he was born with chicken claws and is preparing a dish; I mean chicken claws are on the menu — for … chicken bone broth, I think? I’m pretty sure I have ADHD; sometimes I just smile and nod when this dude says things, and I’m not really following.
If I take off my glasses, they actually look like jumbo shrimp. Which I can only imagine would be an unfortunate mistake for someone to make.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 