Six years in the trenches on troll patrol.

For six years, from 2012 to 2018, my job was to read and delete the most inappropriate comments on a conservative news site. Not all the inappropriate comments. Just the most inappropriate comments. Hundreds of comments an hour. Thousands of comments a day. Tens of thousands of comments a week. More than a million comments a year.

I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”

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This was the only job that made me cry. I’ve had jobs where I got chewed out by bosses or customers. That’s not fun. I’ve had to deal with people who made me angry, but this was the only job that made me lose faith in humanity. The night Trayvon Martin died, before his body was even cold, I had to work through hundreds of comments about how he deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I sat at my computer and cried.

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Even in the early days of the campaign, cultural conservatives, fiscal conservatives, the weirdos who talked only about chemtrails — they all had one thing in common. They wanted a president who would stick it to the liberals. They didn’t care that supporting him would mean changing their positions on any number of issues.

All they knew was that he drove the liberals crazy. He was just like all of the anonymous internet commenters. He justified their existence, and they justified his. And they all rallied around him. The campaign was seemingly born out of, and supported by, comment sections. Our job became tougher. As a news blog, we were covering stories featuring a man running for president saying things that I would have deleted his account for had he been just another troll on the site. But he wasn’t just another troll.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/right-wing-site-comments.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

There were several crucial questions surrounding Saturday night’s Gridiron dinner, that exclusive, annual white-tie gathering hosted by a club made up of Washington’s most elite journalists: First of all, would President Trump turn up?

The answer to that one came early in the evening: Nope, the president wouldn’t attend as he did last year. Instead, his daughter and top White House adviser, Ivanka Trump, gave remarks.

The younger Trump appeared at the Renaissance Hotel before a crowd of about 700 of the city’s swampiest of swamp-dwellers, offering up a few remarks in the spirit of the night, which traditionally features jokey remarks from the president (when he’s in attendance — presidents since Benjamin Harrison have joined in on the 134-year-old tradition), a prominent Democrat and Republican and a slew of skits by the Fourth Estate.

Ivanka Trump, who said her father had asked her just that afternoon to represent him, got a cringeworthy laugh with a line that poked fun at her conservative bona fides — and her notoriously difficult boss/dad. “The press seems to think it’s ironic that I, born of great privilege, think people want to work for what they are given,” she deadpanned. “As if being Donald Trump’s daughter isn’t the hardest job in the world.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/03/03/gridiron-dinner-ivanka-tries-laughs-if-being-donald-trumps-daughter-isnt-hardest-job-world/?utm_term=.3df7a68995af

Parker Molloy
‏Verified account @ParkerMolloy

I feel like tweeting “So triggered...” at the widow of someone you mocked during a speech the day before is the most accurate description of the conservative movement in 2019

There are too many unanswered questions about the White House’s role in advancing Saudi ambitions.



Jared Kushner slipped quietly into Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, so the question I’m trying to get the White House to answer is this: Did they discuss American help for a Saudi nuclear program?

Of all the harebrained and unscrupulous dealings of the Trump administration in the last two years, one of the most shocking is a Trump plan to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Even as President Trump is trying to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, he may be helping to nuclearize Saudi Arabia. This is abominable policy tainted by a gargantuan conflict of interest involving Kushner.

Kushner’s family real estate business had been teetering because of a disastrously overpriced acquisition he made of a particular Manhattan property called 666 Fifth Avenue, but last August a company called Brookfield Asset Management rescued the Kushners by taking a 99-year lease of the troubled property — and paying the whole sum of about $1.1 billion up front.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/saudi-arabia-jared-kushner-nuclear.html

In celebration of the SheBelieves spirit, the U.S. Women’s National Team will honor powerful, influential, iconic and inspirational women during the SheBelieves Cup match on March 2 vs. England in Nashville, Tennessee.

Each member of the U.S. WNT selected the name of a woman who has inspired them and will wear that name on the back of their jersey. The choices ranged from activists to Nobel Prize winners, to artists, athletes and trailblazers, from historic to contemporary, and features women who hail from diverse backgrounds and champion a variety of causes.

SheBelieves is a movement that originated in 2015 in the lead up to the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was created with the goal encouraging the female leaders of tomorrow to chase their dreams. The theme of women supporting women is one the U.S. players passionately believe in, so with the SheBelieves Cup and Women’s History Month occurring concurrently, the timing is perfect for a celebration of groundbreaking women.

We asked each WNT player on the SheBelieves Cup roster why they chose their specific woman and compiled their answers below.

https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2019/03/02/04/58/20190302-feat-wnt-honors-inspirational-women-with-names-on-back-of-jerseys-2019-shebelieves-cup

Asked by @mschlapp about reports that Pres Trump doesn't read much, Mulvaney said @POTUS reads @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @nypost and @WSJ "cover to cover every single day." Says pres watching news all the time and reading all the time.