Dear Commons Community,

Science has an interesting article this morning (see below) describing the current state of brain research that relies on supercomputers for analysis.  The article mentions several supercomputer operations around the world that are being used by neuroscientists to map and graph various parts of the brain but in general fall short of what is needed. It is my sense that a whole new generation of computers, probably dependent upon quantum technology, will be needed to provide the data storage and speed for the type of research that neuroscience requires. This is likely a decade away.

Tony

Click on to enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

May all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving. 

If you are in New York, take in the Macy’s Parade – a tradition in the Big Apple like no other.

Tony

Ahmaud Arbery

Dear Commons Community,

Jurors this afternoon convicted the three white men charged in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black man who was chased and fatally shot while running through their neighborhood in an attack that became part of the larger national reckoning on racial injustice.

The jury deliberated for about 10 hours before convicting Greg McMichael, son Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, who all face minimum sentences of life in prison. It is up to the judge to decide whether that comes with or without the possibility of parole.

Travis McMichael stood for the verdict, his lawyer’s arm around his shoulder. At one point, McMichael lowered his head to his chest. After the verdicts were read, as he stood to leave, he mouthed “love you” to his mother, who was in the courtroom.

Greg McMichael hung his head when the judge read his first guilty verdict. Robbie Bryan bit his lip.

Moments after the verdicts were announced, Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr., was seen crying and hugging supporters outside the courtroom.

“He didn’t do nothing,” the father said, “but run and dream.”

Ben Crump, attorney for Arbery’s father, spoke outside the courthouse, saying repeatedly that “the spirit of Ahmaud defeated the lynch mob.”

Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, thanked the crowd gathered for the verdict and said she did not think she would see this day.

“It’s been a long fight. It’s been a hard fight. But God is good,” she said. Of her son, she said, “He will now rest in peace.”

The McMichaels grabbed guns and jumped in a pickup truck to pursue the 25-year-old after seeing him running outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick in February 2020. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own pickup and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery.

The father and son told police they suspected Arbery was a fleeing burglar. But the prosecution argued that the men provoked the fatal confrontation and that there was no evidence Arbery had committed crimes in the neighborhood.

“We commend the courage and bravery of this jury to say that what happened on Feb. 23, 2020, to Ahmaud Arbery — the hunting and killing of Ahmaud Arbery — it was not only morally wrong but legally wrong, and we are thankful for that,” said Latonia Hines, Cobb County executive assistant district attorney.

Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski, chow was brilliant throughout the trial,  added: “The jury system works in this country, and when you present the truth to people and they see it, they will do the right thing.”

Travis McMichaels’ attorneys said both he and his father feel that they did the right thing, and that they believed the video would help their case. But they also said the McMichaels regret that Arbery got killed.

“I can tell you honestly, these men are sorry for what happened to Ahmaud Arbery,” attorney Jason Sheffield said. “They are sorry he’s dead. They are sorry for the tragedy that happened because of the choices they made to go out there and try to stop him.”

They plan to appeal.

Bryan’s attorney, Kevin Gough, said his team was “disappointed with the verdict, but we respect it.” He planned to file new legal motions after Thanksgiving.

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley did not immediately schedule a sentencing date, saying that he wanted to give both sides time to prepare.

In a statement, President Joe Biden said Arbery’s killing was a “devastating reminder” of how much more work the country has to do in the fight for racial justice.

“While the guilty verdicts reflect our justice system doing its job, that alone is not enough. Instead, we must recommit ourselves to building a future of unity and shared strength, where no one fears violence because of the color of their skin,” Biden said.

Though prosecutors did not argue that racism motivated the killing, federal authorities have charged them with hate crimes, alleging that they chased and killed Arbery because he was Black. That case is scheduled to go to trial in February.

This was a heartfelt day for the Arbery family and for the entire country. We saw a trial with eleven white jurors in Georgia, a deep southern state, decide this case on the side of truth and racial  justice.

Tony

Unite the Right Rally

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, jurors found the main organizers of a deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 liable under state law, awarding more than $25 million in damages to counter protesters, but deadlocked on federal conspiracy charges.

The verdict was a clear rebuke of the defendants — a mix of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers. They were found under Virginia law to have engaged in a conspiracy that led to injuries during the rally. The “Unite the Right” march began as a demonstration over the removal of a Confederate statue and led to the death of the counter-protester Heather Heyer, 32, when she was struck by a car driven by one of the defendants.

The civil suit, heard in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, was filed by four men and five women, including four of the people who were injured when Ms. Heyer was killed. The plaintiffs, whose injuries included concussions and a shattered leg, testified that they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, the inability to concentrate, flashbacks and panic attacks.

All sought compensatory and unspecified punitive damages, including payment for medical costs as well as $3 million to $10 million for pain and suffering depending on the degree of their injuries.

The most prominent defendants included Richard Spencer, once seen as the leader of the alt-right in the United States; Jason Kessler, who organized the event; and Christopher Cantwell, a vocal neo-Nazi podcaster who is already serving 41 months in federal prison in a separate threats and extortion case.  As reported by The New York Times and other media.

“The counter-protesters’ lawyers said that they were considering pursuing a retrial on the federal conspiracy claim. However, the verdict that was returned achieved the same ends in holding the rally’s organizers responsible for violence motivated by racial, religious or ethnic animosity, they said.

“Each and every one of them was found to be part of a conspiracy, and these award damage numbers send a message,” said Karen L. Dunn, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

The largest sums were awarded for punitive damages, with 12 individuals ordered to pay $500,000 apiece while five white nationalist organizations were assessed $1 million each. Any punitive damages paid will be divided evenly among the plaintiffs.

James Fields, already serving multiple life sentences for murdering the counter-protester with his car, was found liable for $12 million in punitive damages, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical expenses stemming from assault, battery and emotional distress.

Lawyers for the far-right organizers said they would seek to reduce those amounts, and there was little chance that their clients could pay in any event. “The defendants in this case are destitute, none of them have any money,” said Joshua Smith, who represented Matthew Heimbach, Matthew Parrott and the Traditionalist Worker Party, modeled on Germany’s Nazi Party.

Mr. Smith sought to portray the decision as a victory for his clients, saying that the lawyers for the other side had expected to “waltz through” the case. A small group of protesters shouted “Get out of town!” at him as he stepped up to address reporters outside the federal courthouse.

Legal experts, however, said that the jury’s decision came down heavily on the side of the plaintiffs. “Though there is some ambiguity in the verdict, the bottom line is that the jury found for the plaintiffs and awarded significant compensatory and punitive damages,” said Richard C. Schragger, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School who had been following the case closely. Mr. Schragger said the outstanding question was why the jury found a racial conspiracy to commit violence under state law but deadlocked over a similar provision of federal law.

He and others noted the explanation of the federal statute in the instructions received by the jury was slightly more complex, including references to constitutional amendments and civil rights.

The lawyers for the counter-protesters said that in addition to holding march organizers responsible for the violence, they hoped to deter hate groups from mounting similar toxic spectacles in the future, relying on civil suits in the absence of decisive action by the criminal justice system.

The federal charges related to whether the rally organizers had engaged in a race-based violent conspiracy, which is illegal under an 1871 federal law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act that was designed to prevent vigilantes from denying newly freed slaves their civil rights.

Many of them readily admitted to their racial animosity, but said they were exercising their First Amendment rights with a legal permit for the rally, not participating in a conspiracy to commit violence. They blamed the violence entirely on Mr. Fields, the demonstrator who mowed down counter-protesters with his car.

The jury was asked to decide whether each of the defendants had engaged in a conspiracy, and, if so, what compensation should be paid to the nine people suing them.

The jury began deliberating on Friday. The 77 pages of instructions from the judge explained how engaging in a conspiracy did not require all participants to forge an agreement or meet in the same room, or even to know one another. Nor did a conspiracy require the participants to have caused the violence themselves. The main point was that they all shared an objective and could foresee the violence that occurred.

The plaintiffs drew a line from Mr. Fields through all the organizations that participated, linking him first to Vanguard America, the group that he marched with in Charlottesville, and then to the other organizations and their leaders. Lawyers for the far-right protesters argued that it was just online chatter that did not amount to strong ties between them, much less a conspiracy. None of the other defendants knew Mr. Fields beforehand, they said, and he was not involved in organizing the event.

The four-week trial, long delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, underscored how much the rally organizers and their groups were already sidelined, squabbling among themselves and financially strapped in the wake of the violent debacle in Charlottesville. Mr. Spencer, who defended himself during the trial, described the case in 2020 as “financially crippling.” Seven defendants ignored the proceedings. Their cases will be addressed separately by the court.

If many far-right players have been shunted aside, the ideology has not been. In recent decades, whenever far-right groups have lost in court, the movement has rebounded.

“While some of the messengers have been eviscerated, the more mainstream versions of their hatemongering continue to have real currency, with broad exposure guaranteeing that the violence of the far-right fringes will unfortunately continue,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

In seeking to prove that the violence was foreseeable, the plaintiffs highlighted how often the idea of hitting protesters with cars came up beforehand.

Samantha Froelich, who was dating two of the main organizers simultaneously in the lead-up to the rally, but who has since left the movement, testified that hitting protesters with cars was discussed at a party earlier that summer in the “Fash Loft,” short for fascist, the nickname for Mr. Spencer’s apartment in Alexandria, Va.

After the violence, Mr. Parrott, whose Traditionalist Worker Party has since disbanded, and the others celebrated. “Charlottesville was a tremendous victory,” he said in a post. “The alt-right is not a pathetic and faceless internet fad, but a fearsome street-fighting force.”

While the plaintiffs’ case took three weeks and 36 witnesses, the defendants rested after a day and a half, having made four broad arguments. First, they argued that while others might deplore their views, the First Amendment allowed them. Second, that they acted in self-defense. Third, that the police were to blame for not keeping the opposing sides apart. Fourth, that none of them could anticipate what Mr. Fields did because none knew him.

The trial brought to life the hatred and anger espoused by the far-right groups, especially on the streets of Charlottesville. A torch-lit march on the eve of the rally, with hundreds of men chanting racist slogans, evoked Ku Klux Klan and Nazi marches. The testimony as well as the many videos and social media posts introduced were awash in the iconography of hate, with Nazi symbols and stiff-armed salutes, with admiration for Hitler and claims that nonwhite races were inferior.

Supporters of the far-right maintained a cheering section online full of expletive-laced rants against Black and Jewish people, while the defendants themselves weighed in with commentary. In an online interview, Michael Hill, 69, president of the League of the South, which seeks to establish a white ethno-state, called the courtroom a “front line” in the battle.

While testifying, Mr. Hill was asked to read part of a pledge that he had posted online. “I pledge to be a white supremacist, racist, antisemite, homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe and any other sort of phobe that benefits my people, so help me God,” he read with apparent enthusiasm. He added: “I still hold those views.”

Lawyers for the white supremacists had argued that such messages of hate were not enough to prove the plaintiffs’ case.

“They’ve proven to you that the alt-right is the alt-right — they are racists; they are antisemites,” James Kolenich, one of the defense lawyers, said in closing arguments. “But what does that do to prove a conspiracy?”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs said that the verdict was a condemnation of what happened in 2017 in Charlottesville.

“I think this verdict is a message today that this country does not tolerate violence based on racial and religious hatred in any form, and that no one will ever bring violence to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, ever again,” said Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney who organized the case through a nonprofit organization called Integrity First for America.

Congratulations to the jury in this case but I don’t think we have heard  the last of it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci considers “ridiculous” attacks on him from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and others as a “badge of honor,” the nation’s top infectious diseases expert told MSNBC’s Ari Melber yesterday (see video above).

Fauci, who is currently President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, nailed the absurdity of such attacks:

“I’m trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people. So the only question I have is that when you show Tucker Carlson and (former Trump White House trade adviser) Peter Navarro criticizing me, I consider that a badge of honor.”

“They always throw up those people that make those ridiculous statements, you know, they’re telling people to do things that they’re going to die from and they’re telling me I should go to jail. As they say in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, ‘Give me a break will you?’” he added.

Self-confessed liar Carlson has repeatedly amplified coronavirus and vaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation on his widely watched show.

Fauci wasn’t bothered by the polarizing response he draws on social media, he said, calling “the praise or the arrows and slings” as “really irrelevant.”

“I’m not in it for a popularity contest,” Fauci told Melber. “I’ve devoted my entire professional career of 50 years to try and essentially safeguard and preserve the health and the lives of the American people and as an infectious disease doctor who deals with outbreak, that gets really extended to the rest of the world. That’s what I do.”

Fauci is right on and is a man of enormous credibility and honesty.  I would add that in terms of integrity, he is ten times the person that Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham,  and the rest of the Fox News crew are with the exceptions of Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump’s onetime personal attorney and fixer, appeared (see video above) Monday on CNN just hours after he was released from house arrest.

“Been waiting for this day for a long time,” Cohen told host Alisyn Camerota as he joined her in the studio for “CNN Newsroom.”

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018 after pleading guilty to crimes including campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress.

The campaign finance violations were tied to his role in arranging hush money payments to two women ― adult film star Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal ― to keep them from making public statements during the 2016 presidential race about alleged extramarital affairs with Trump. Cohen has said he did this at the direction of Trump.

“I do want to make this promise to you and to all of your viewers: I may have been prosecuted, and right now I am the only one, but I will not be the only one” to be prosecuted over the hush money payments and for other crimes related to Trump, Cohen told Camerota.

He said that Trump’s three eldest children played a role, as well as Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who was arrested and charged with tax crimes in July.

“There were quite a few people [involved],” Cohen said. “Eric Trump was involved, obviously Allen Weisselberg, who is already under indictment, Don Jr., Ivanka. There were a slew of people that were involved in this. I was certainly not alone. This wasn’t a one-on-one conversation with Donald. It was a much bigger group. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Cohen said Monday that he will continue to give his full cooperation to ongoing investigations, including the Manhattan district attorney’s probe of the Trump Organization and Weisselberg.

Cohen has made similar predictions about Trump’s eldest children in the past. Asked why no further indictments have been handed down, he said, “the wheels of justice turn slowly, but at the end of the day they do ultimately turn full circle.”

He also comments that Trump’s ego is too fragile to run for re-election and that he could not stand being a two-time loser.

While I may be wrong, I find the former “fixer” for Trump credible.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Researchers at an artificial intelligence lab at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle unveiled new technology last month that was designed to make moral judgments. They called it Delphi, after the religious oracle consulted by the ancient Greeks. Anyone can visit the Delphi website and ask for an ethical decree. 

“Joseph Austerweil, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tested the technology using a few simple scenarios. When he asked if he should kill one person to save another, Delphi said he shouldn’t. When he asked if it was right to kill one person to save 100 others, it said he should. Then he asked if he should kill one person to save 101 others. This time, Delphi said he should not.  Morality can be as knotty problem for a machine as it is for humans.

I tried several scenarios including one as to who should get the COVID vaccine, my wife or I, if only one was available (see the graphic above) depicting the question and Delphi’s response in red.  Delphi also asks whether you agree or disagree with its conclusion.  I disagreed!

As reported by The New York Times.

Delphi, which has received more than three million visits over the past few weeks, is an effort to address what some see as a major problem in modern A.I. systems: They can be as flawed as the people who create them.

Facial recognition systems and digital assistants show bias against women and people of color. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter fail to control hate speech, despite wide deployment of artificial intelligence. Algorithms used by courts, parole offices and police departments make parole and sentencing recommendations that can seem arbitrary.

A growing number of computer scientists and ethicists are working to address those issues. And the creators of Delphi hope to build an ethical framework that could be installed in any online service, robot or vehicle.

“It’s a first step toward making A.I. systems more ethically informed, socially aware and culturally inclusive,” said Yejin Choi, the Allen Institute researcher and University of Washington computer science professor who led the project.

Delphi is by turns fascinating, frustrating and disturbing. It is also a reminder that the morality of any technological creation is a product of those who have built it. The question is: Who gets to teach ethics to the world’s machines? A.I. researchers? Product managers? Mark Zuckerberg? Trained philosophers and psychologists? Government regulators?

While some technologists applauded Dr. Choi and her team for exploring an important and thorny area of technological research, others argued that the very idea of a moral machine is nonsense.

“This is not something that technology does very well,” said Ryan Cotterell, an A.I. researcher at ETH Zürich, a university in Switzerland, who stumbled onto Delphi in its first days online.

Delphi is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network, which is a mathematical system loosely modeled on the web of neurons in the brain. It is the same technology that recognizes the commands you speak into your smartphone and identifies pedestrians and street signs as self-driving cars speed down the highway.

A neural network learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of cat photos, for instance, it can learn to recognize a cat. Delphi learned its moral compass by analyzing more than 1.7 million ethical judgments by real live humans.

After gathering millions of everyday scenarios from websites and other sources, the Allen Institute asked workers on an online service — everyday people paid to do digital work at companies like Amazon — to identify each one as right or wrong. Then they fed the data into Delphi.

In an academic paper describing the system, Dr. Choi and her team said a group of human judges — again, digital workers — thought that Delphi’s ethical judgments were up to 92 percent accurate. Once it was released to the open internet, many others agreed that the system was surprisingly wise.

When Patricia Churchland, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, asked if it was right to “leave one’s body to science” or even to “leave one’s child’s body to science,” Delphi said it was. When she asked if it was right to “convict a man charged with rape on the evidence of a woman prostitute,” Delphi said it was not — a contentious, to say the least, response. Still, she was somewhat impressed by its ability to respond, though she knew a human ethicist would ask for more information before making such pronouncements.

Others found the system woefully inconsistent, illogical and offensive. When a software developer stumbled onto Delphi, she asked the system if she should die so she wouldn’t burden her friends and family. It said she should. Ask Delphi that question now, and you may get a different answer from an updated version of the program. Delphi, regular users have noticed, can change its mind from time to time. Technically, those changes are happening because Delphi’s software has been updated.

Artificial intelligence technologies seem to mimic human behavior in some situations but completely break down in others. Because modern systems learn from such large amounts of data, it is difficult to know when, how or why they will make mistakes. Researchers may refine and improve these technologies. But that does not mean a system like Delphi can master ethical behavior.

Dr. Churchland said ethics are intertwined with emotion. “Attachments, especially attachments between parents and offspring, are the platform on which morality builds,” she said. But a machine lacks emotion. “Neutral networks don’t feel anything,” she added.

Some might see this as a strength — that a machine can create ethical rules without bias — but systems like Delphi end up reflecting the motivations, opinions and biases of the people and companies that build them.

“We can’t make machines liable for actions,” said Zeerak Talat, an A.I. and ethics researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “They are not unguided. There are always people directing them and using them.”

Delphi reflected the choices made by its creators. That included the ethical scenarios they chose to feed into the system and the online workers they chose to judge those scenarios.

In the future, the researchers could refine the system’s behavior by training it with new data or by hand-coding rules that override its learned behavior at key moments. But however they build and modify the system, it will always reflect their worldview.

Some would argue that if you trained the system on enough data representing the views of enough people, it would properly represent societal norms. But societal norms are often in the eye of the beholder.

“Morality is subjective. It is not like we can just write down all the rules and give them to a machine,” said Kristian Kersting, a professor of computer science at TU Darmstadt University in Germany who has explored a similar kind of technology.

When the Allen Institute released Delphi in mid-October, it described the system as a computational model for moral judgments. If you asked if you should have an abortion, it responded definitively: “Delphi says: you should.”

But after many complained about the obvious limitations of the system, the researchers modified the website. They now call Delphi “a research prototype designed to model people’s moral judgments.” It no longer “says.” It “speculates.”

It also comes with a disclaimer: “Model outputs should not be used for advice for humans, and could be potentially offensive, problematic or harmful.”

Try Delphi. You might find it interesting!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally’s wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered.

Oswald was arrested by the Dallas Police Department 70 minutes after the initial shooting. At 11:21 a.m. November 24, 1963, as live television cameras were covering his transfer from the city jail to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died. Ruby was convicted of Oswald’s murder, though it was later overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

I remember the day and hour as if it was yesterday.

Our country was never the same!

Tony

Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg

Dear Commons Community,

Two familiar conservative contributors, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, resigned from Fox News in protest against its “irresponsible coverage” and promotion of “disturbing evidence of righ-wing radicalization.”  As reported by The New York Times and CNN.

The trailer for Tucker Carlson’s special about the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol landed online on Oct. 27, and that night Jonah Goldberg sent a text to his business partner, Stephen Hayes: “I’m tempted just to quit Fox over this.”

“I’m game,” Mr. Hayes replied. “Totally outrageous. It will lead to violence. Not sure how we can stay.”

The full special, “Patriot Purge,” appeared on Fox’s online subscription streaming service days later. And last week, the two men, both paid Fox News contributors, finalized their resignations from the network.

In some ways, their departures should not be surprising: It’s simply part of the new right’s mopping up operation in the corners of conservative institutions that still house pockets of resistance to Donald J. Trump’s control of the Republican Party. Mr. Goldberg, a former National Review writer, and Mr. Hayes, a former Weekly Standard writer, were stars of the pre-Trump conservative movement. They clearly staked out their positions in 2019 when they founded The Dispatch, an online publication that they described as “a place that thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary.” It now has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers.

“Every month or so, while conversing with sources at Fox News, I [Brian Stelter] express surprise that Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes are still employed by the network. The two men are reality-based conservative thinkers who refused to capitulate to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, Fox viewers rarely got to hear from them. This year they were booked by the network’s producers so rarely that their contracts could be likened to golden handcuffs.

Now they are ditching the cuffs. Hayes and Goldberg announced last night that they have resigned from Fox. The pair wrote in a blog post for The Dispatch, their online home, that Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” propaganda film was the last straw.

“Fox News still does real reporting, and there are still responsible conservatives providing valuable opinion and analysis,” the men wrote. “But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible,” and Carlson is the case in point. CNN and many other news outlets have described how “Patriot Purge” is disturbing evidence of right-wing radicalization, complete with January 6 denialism and paranoid descriptions of a “new war on terror” targeting Republicans. Goldberg and Hayes simply could not take it anymore.

New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, who broke the resignation news on Sunday, called up Carlson for reaction, and the trollish host naturally celebrated, saying “our viewers will be grateful” that Goldberg and Hayes are gone. But the conservative movement will suffer for it.

Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the Republican party’s foremost critics of Trump and the Big Lie, tweeted out a thank-you to the two men “for standing up for truth and calling out dangerous lies.”

Goldberg, in a phone interview with Smith, provided a rare on-the-record peek inside Fox’s political positioning. Per Smith, “Goldberg said that” he and Hayes “stayed on at Fox News as long they did because of a sense from conversations at Fox that, after Mr. Trump’s defeat, the network would try to recover some of its independence and, as he put it, ‘right the ship.'” But Fox’s decision to promote and publish “Patriot Purge” in early November was “a sign that people have made peace with this direction of things, and there is no plan, at least, that anyone made me aware of for a course correction,” Goldberg said.

In Sunday night’s post on The Dispatch, the two commentators said the “Patriot Purge” web series “creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself.”

Hayes and Goldberg praised the “news side” (which keeps shrinking at Fox) but acknowledged that the opinion side has radicalized. “The release of ‘Patriot Purge’ wasn’t an isolated incident,” they wrote, “it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend.” So they’re out. “We do not regret our decision,” they concluded, “even if we find it regrettably necessary.”

FOR THE RECORD

— Former VP Pence aide turned Trump admin critic Olivia Troye wrote, “Thank you Jonah Goldberg & Stephen Hayes for taking a stand for the truth against an ongoing dangerous enterprise.”

— Conservative writer Bill Kristol sent the two men kudos “for standing up to Fox, yelling Stop, at a time when few other conservatives are inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it…”

— Liberal writer Dan Froomkin’s reaction: “We should ALL quit Fox Noise. And reality-based journalists should work to wean America off it…”

— “Steve and Jonah have been two of the bravest journalists during this whole mess,” David Brooks tweeted. “They’ve taken positions that carry real costs. Think about supporting The Dispatch.”

— On Saturday, Jim Acosta dubbed Tucker Carlson “the BS Factory’s employee of the year…”

Tony