1. Was making a QAnon reading list for a journalist friend of mine, and thought the rest of you might find it useful as well – especially this week. Enjoy.

A PLEA TO U.K. JOURNALISTS

You clearly signed up to the #dontmentiontheschools omertà from August to December.

No questions regarding why @educationgovuk allowed bubbles of 300, no SD, no masks, interchanging classes of 30 and poor ventilation

You refused to ask the questions

Parents watched our children and teachers get unnecessarily infected.

Yes, not all of them died, yes not all of them were hospitalised but THEY WERE unnecessarily exposed in school settings and you sat by and did nothing for FOUR MONTHS

We begged for your help...

We provided the UNSCIENTIFIC guidance to schools issued by @educationgovuk

We showed you how completely against ALL OF THE BASIC SAFETY MEASURES required in all other indoor settings where households mix it is.

We asked you to ask why it was this way...

Until the moves to close one or two days early by schools prior to Christmas were rejected, until the Unions began to take steps to protect their members, YOU showed no interest.

You were complicit in continuing to polarise the schools debate into OPEN vs CLOSED

...when the accurate discussion needed to be;

1. OPEN SAFELY for in-person education provision
or
2. Temporarily provide remote education until number 1 can be done

Why is this? Who gained from this polarisation?

On an almost daily basis I see journalism about (never by) trans people repeating and spreading inaccurate information or responding to a partially imagined reality. It goes without saying that any discussion about trans rights needs to begin with facts!

People talk about trans people accessing spaces based on their gender identity as a big scary dangerous change coming down the tracks. Trans people *already* live their lives and access spaces on the basis of self-ID. No one produces a birth certificate to go to the loo!

It’s also the case that in the trickiest cases like domestic abuse refuges, there are exemptions in the Equality Act. (This looks like a piece about RLB but it’s a GRA/EA explainer!)

There have also been misunderstandings about new perinatal guidance at Brighton & Sussex hospital trust (ie the “chest-feeding” debate)

Phrases like "chest-feeding" are given in the guidance as an example of language that a trans man or non-binary person who is expecting a baby might prefer nurses to use. If you’re a new mum in these hospitals it is *explicit* that the language used to address you won’t change.

Want to understand how pervasive media bias works? Read on.

Check out this awful headline from @AP. A gun was found on the scene, there are bullet casings and bullet holes on nearby walls.

This isn't simply an allegation. This was clearly was a gunman.

It would be bad enough if the Associated Press alone published this headline. But because @AP is a wire service, many other leading news outlets have republished this content, often verbatim.

Here's the article on the @WashingtonPost, for example.

And here's the same article, and same headline, on @YahooNews.

The article was republished in plenty more well-known media outlets. Here it is on the @ABC website.

Moving forward, the content of the article is deeply problematic. This is how an article about an attempted shooting attack begins: by focusing on the *response* of the security forces to being attacked.

For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

There is no secretly powerful "Republican establishment" that will fix things. There are thugs, deluded people, and there are quislings. There is no one else in the GOP. Instead of focusing on the radical right's danger, editors wanted stories about Trump tweets.

Instead of calling out the dangerous radicalism of the GOP, television debate shows and opinion pages invited the enablers of fascism to speak and write about how we all needed to give powerful insane people the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Trump, who walled off the White House months ago into a fortress, Nancy Pelosi did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough to demand better security. She has the budget and the authority and did nothing similar. Now, fascists are on the floor of Congress.

Of course, it is Trump who bears the responsibility for this but the Capitol Police have totally disgraced themselves by not fortifying the building the way that the Secret Service did to the WH.

This is the view of numerous congressional staffers of both parties.