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Welcome back to the Red Room, Democrats. On Thursday morning President Trump fired off a stream of consciousness tweet tinkering with the idea of delaying the election. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1288818160389558273 Imagine how your typical online Democrat seizes on that garbled statement. It’s a chance to release all her tension, under the guise of fighting a big bad tyrant. She feigns rage publicly — but deep down she is truly titillated. The President has created a class of masochists, and she is one of them. ‘Please daddy, don’t delay my election,’ she thinks, biting her lower lip as she taps out ‘#OrangeManBad’ on her keyboard and prepares to max out her donation to the Amy McGrath Senate campaign.

Is that a face mask — or a gag? The President’s son, Donald Trump Jr, has had the functionality of his Twitter account restricted after sharing a video which supposedly breaches the site’s COVID misinformation policy. Jack Dorsey slapped Don Jr on the wrist for posting footage of the America’s Frontline Doctors Press Conference, which was held outside the Supreme Court on Monday. In the video, doctors from the newly-formed group claim that masks are unnecessary to prevent the spread of the virus, and that there is a cure to COVID-19. The President himself also retweeted the footage. As he told Dave Portnoy last week, ‘It’s the retweets that get you into trouble.

Recently I had one of those dreams. I woke up wanting to forget it immediately, like most dreams. But it reached out from the depths of my subconscious with a message that rippled and reverberated through my waking day. You know those dreams? They’re sticky. In my dream, I’m sitting at the bedside of an older woman. She looks familiar. I can’t place how I know her — she isn’t my mother or an aunt — but I can’t shake the feeling that we are related. The woman holds my hand. She is dying. ‘Bridget,’ she asks, ‘how do you feel about the time you spend on Twitter?’ What a weird question for a woman on her deathbed to be asking, I think. Nonetheless, her question makes me defensive.

After two months, the 'mostly peaceful' label for the riots gripping American cities is wearing a touch thin. That’s not just because it fails to satisfy conservatives and moderates, who puzzle over how 'mostly peaceful' demonstrations leave so many downtowns torched. It also fails to satisfy the actual rioters. They insist their demonstrations are very violent, courtesy of brutal tactics from the police officers they want abolished.'Proof' of such violence went viral on Wednesday. The video was first shared by Twitter user @Andy_Resist, but was swiftly magnified by a different Andy. This one bore Twitter’s hallowed blue checkmark and enough followers to populate a small city, or a few dozen 'mostly peaceful' protests. https://twitter.

Nearly three months into lockdown, 40 million Americans were unemployed. Kids lost out on three months of schooling. Businesses shuttered, many never to open again. Mental health suffered. People lost their homes. Tens of thousands died alone in hospitals, family members were prevented from holding the hands of their loved ones in their final days, and in many cases they weren’t allowed to bury them or hold a funeral. Parents struggled to balance distance learning and work. Teachers worried that their most vulnerable students weren’t logging in to class. People couldn’t receive medical treatment or attend birthdays and graduations. But humans are creative, resilient creatures, and it didn’t take long before we adjusted to living online.

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.