Elections

A postal worker whose allegations of ballot tampering have been the basis of Republicans’ calls for investigations has reportedly recanted his story.Democrats on the House oversight committee have said that Richard Hopkins, the worker who claimed in a signed affidavit that a supervisor at the US Postal Service (USPS) in Erie, Pennsylvania, instructed staff to tamper with ballots by backdating ones that arrived late, recanted this allegations yesterday in an interview with investigators for the USPS Inspector General.Investigators told the committee that Hopkins “did not explain why he signed a false affidavit”, the committee wrote in a statement.Hopkins admitted to fabricating his claims, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing three officials. After he the affidavit, the South Carolina Republican senator Lindsay Graham, who heads the Senate judiciary committee, called for a federal investigation.BREAKING NEWS: Erie, Pa. #USPS whistleblower completely RECANTED his allegations of a supervisor tampering with mail-in ballots after being questioned by investigators, according to IG. THREAD:— Oversight Committee (@OversightDems) November 10, 2020
Yesterday, the US attorney general sent a memo to prosecutors approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence that such fraud was taking place.In response, the top justice department official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned – pointing to a 40-year department policy to refrain from intervening in elections and carry out investigations only after elections are certified.News that Hopkins had fabricated his claims came as the Trump campaign continued to pursue longshot lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia that are not backed by credible evidence.Among these lawsuits is an effort in Pennsylvania to push the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that are postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices up to three days later. The state’s supreme court had approved a deadline extension for ballots that arrived late; several other states accept late-arriving ballots.The Trump campaign attempted to argue in federal court that Republican observers were blocked from monitoring the vote count, until a lawyer for the campaign had to admit that actually a “non-zero” number observers had been allowed.These dubious lawsuits and investigations have continued after media outlets projected that Joe Biden was the clear winner of the election. Trump has yet to concede and has illegitimately declared himself the victor.Top Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have defended Trump’s right to challenge the election results. On Monday, McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor that Trump was “100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options”.Republicans have been scrambling to drum up any evidence to back their baseless claims of fraud, opening up a hotline that was inundated with prank calls. On Tuesday, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, said he was offering $1m to incentivize people to come forth with evidence of irregularities.The party’s efforts are unlikely to have any effect on the outcome of the presidential election. Biden has secured a big enough lead in swing states that even if some ballots that Republicans want thrown out were discarded, he would still win.But critics have said that the president’s refusal to admit defeat and Republicans’ efforts to challenge the results are sowing doubt in the US elections system.A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week of 1,363 adults found that 79% of Americans believe Joe Biden won the election, including about 60% of Republicans. About 72% said that the loser of the election should concede. A separate poll from Politico and Morning Consult, however, found that 70% of Republicans do not believe the presidential election was “free and fair”.The president and his party’s efforts to undermine the effectiveness of the US elections system began before election day.In August, Trump admitted he was undermining the postal service so the USPS would have a harder time delivering mail-in ballots. Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general and a major Republican donor, was found to have made cuts to the service amid major service delays reported around the country. More

On Sunday, as votes were still being tallied in one of the most hotly contested elections in United States history, Brian Maiorana took to social media with a dark and violent message, prosecutors say.Citing the anti-government novel “The Turner Diaries,” in which Jews and nonwhites are exterminated, Mr. Maiorana wrote that he wanted to “blow up” an F.B.I. building and made an anti-Semitic reference to “the Jew Senator from Jew York,” a veiled threat apparently directed at Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader.In an early morning raid Tuesday, the authorities arrested Mr. Maiorana, 54, at his house on Staten Island. Later in the day, he was charged in court with making threatening interstate communications. Tuesday evening, he was brought before a magistrate judge in Brooklyn federal court who ordered that he be detained pending a bail hearing.Prosecutors said that starting in September, Mr. Maiorana had used a social media platform to post multiple threats to kill protesters, politicians and law enforcement officers. The prosecutors did not specify which online platform Mr. Maiorana used. His Facebook page is topped with the hashtag #All Lives Matter and makes clear that he supports President Trump, but it shows no sign of violent messages.Brian Maiorana“The Department of Justice will not stand idly by when people like the defendant allegedly threaten to kill elected officials, lawful protesters and law enforcement simply because of animus towards the outcome of an election,” said Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn. “Americans have a constitutional right to voice their opinions, but this office will not tolerate violence or threats of violence used to intimidate others with whom they disagree.”The charges against Mr. Maiorana came as Americans waited anxiously for the election’s results to be certified and as Mr. Trump refused to concede to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., choosing instead to make baseless claims about widespread voter fraud.Prosecutors said in a criminal complaint that Mr. Maiorana’s belligerent posts included threats to kill people who celebrated the election’s outcome and a suggestion that the presidency had been “fraudulently stolen from us.” On Oct. 19, prosecutors said, Mr. Maiorana wrote on an unidentified online platform that the time had come “where pipe bombs need to be thrown into these mobs,” a reference to the protests against police brutality that have continued across the country for months. Two days after the election, the complaint said, Mr. Maiorana wrote: “The carnage needs to come in the form of extermination of anyone that claims to be a democrat.” Election 2020 More

If you visited Google’s YouTube in the days after the election last week, you may have found a video of an anchor from One America News Network declaring victory for President Trump with the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats were “tossing Republican ballots.”Or a clip from Mr. Trump stating on his own YouTube channel that if all the “legal votes” were counted, he would win easily. Or a video claiming that Real Clear Politics, a political news site, had “rescinded” its call that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. was projected to win Pennsylvania.All of these videos were baseless and spread misinformation challenging the validity of the election’s outcome. Yet those videos are still available on YouTube while being shared widely on Facebook and other social media platforms.This is not a glitch or an oversight in YouTube’s policy enforcement. Instead, YouTube has said its policies are working as intended. Its light-touch approach differs from Twitter and Facebook, which have cracked down on misinformation about the election and have more prominently labeled content that they deem to be misinformation.“Disinformation is being spread on YouTube, but they’re not being transparent at all about how they’re dealing with it,” said Lisa Kaplan, the founder of Alethea Group, a company that helps fight election-related misinformation. “YouTube has been able to stay out of the limelight because of the nature of the platform.”Video is harder to analyze than text, Ms. Kaplan said, and videos are not shared in the same way that Facebook posts and tweets are shared.Before the election, YouTube said it would not permit misleading election information, but limited that mainly to the procedures around voting — how to vote, who was eligible to vote or be a candidate, or any claims that could discourage voting. The policies did not extend to people expressing views on the outcome of a current election or the process of counting votes — meaning, in effect, that videos spreading misinformation about the vote’s outcome would be permitted.“The majority of election-related searches are surfacing results from authoritative sources, and we’re reducing the spread of harmful elections-related misinformation,” Andrea Faville, a YouTube spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Like other companies, we are allowing discussions of the election results and the process of counting votes and are continuing to closely monitor new developments.”The company removes content that violates its policies, she said, especially any content that seeks to incite violence. She declined to say how many videos YouTube had removed.YouTube’s actions are opaque. Its most powerful tool is an algorithm that has been trained to suppress so-called borderline content — videos that bump up against its rules but don’t clearly violate them — from appearing high in search results or recommendations. But YouTube does not disclose which videos are designated as borderline so people have to guess whether the company is taking action or not.Even if YouTube takes steps to make it harder for people to find the videos on its site, it does not prevent a user from sharing it widely elsewhere. As a result, many YouTube videos have found new life on Facebook. The video spreading falsehoods about Real Clear Politics rescinding its projection of Mr. Biden winning Pennsylvania had about 1.5 million views on YouTube and it had been shared 67,000 times on Facebook as of Tuesday afternoon, according to BuzzSumo, a web analytics tool.YouTube has marked some videos as ineligible for advertising. For the video from One America News, which ran last Wednesday, YouTube said it removed ads from it because the content undermined “confidence in elections with demonstrably false information.” That left YouTube in an awkward position of acknowledging the potentially harmful effects of the video, while continuing to host the video at the same time.YouTube has also labeled all election-related videos. On Saturday, it changed the label from a warning that the election outcome may not be final to a statement that “the AP has called the Presidential race for Joe Biden” with a link to a Google page with the results. YouTube said it has displayed this information panel “billions of times.” More

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans rehashed unproven allegations of corruption and bias at the F.B.I. on Tuesday, attacking the bureau’s former acting director Andrew G. McCabe during a contentious Judiciary Committee hearing.The hearing, led by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of President Trump’s, was a recounting of perceived injustices that the president and his supporters have amplified over the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. They included the botched applications to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the treatment of the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and a notorious dossier about purported Trump-Russia links.Senator John Cornyn of Texas accused the F.B.I. of going “rogue,” while Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said the bureau had a “culture of corruption and cover-up.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri described the investigation as the “biggest scandal in the history of the F.B.I.”Mr. McCabe repeatedly rejected Republican claims that the F.B.I.’s actions were politically motivated.“Let me be very clear: We didn’t open a case because we liked one candidate or didn’t like the other one,” he said in his opening statement. “We didn’t open a case because we intended to stage a coup or overthrow the government.”Mr. McCabe, who testified remotely because of the pandemic, acknowledged serious F.B.I. mistakes in the Page wiretap applications, one of which he signed. He said he would not have approved it knowing what he has learned since. “We’re all responsible for the work that went into that FISA,” Mr. McCabe said, referring to requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.A Justice Department inspector general report issued last December found egregious errors and omissions in the applications to wiretap Mr. Page in the months after he left the Trump campaign, based on investigators’ suspicions about his ties to Russia.Republicans pressed Mr. McCabe about who at the F.B.I. was to blame for the problems. They wrongly insisted that no one had been held responsible; the inspector general’s report did assign blame, singling out an F.B.I. agent assigned as “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions.”The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, has said line-level employees who played a role in the Page wiretap applications were referred to the bureau’s office of professional responsibility, its disciplinary arm.The inspector general report also found that the F.B.I. had sufficient reason to open the Russia investigation and that investigators acted without political bias in doing so.Democrats on the committee made clear they had little patience for Mr. Graham’s inquiry, believing it was a waste of time as they accused Attorney General William P. Barr of politicizing the Justice Department.“This is a last-ditch, desperate undertaking to deal with President Trump’s grievances about that election,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, accusing the Republican-led committee of holding another “partisan hearing to advance President Trump’s theories.”Before the hearing started, Mr. Trump took aim at Mr. McCabe, a frequent target. “Republicans, don’t let Andrew McCabe continue to get away with totally criminal activity,” the president wrote on Twitter. “What he did should never be allowed to happen to our Country again. FIGHT FOR JUSTICE!”During the hearing, Mr. Graham repeatedly accused the F.B.I. of treating Mr. Trump unfairly, saying he should have been warned about Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election on his behalf.Mr. Graham pointed to a recently declassified document of unverified information that suggested that Russian intelligence had acquired information that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan for her 2016 campaign to “stir up a scandal” against Mr. Trump by tying him to the Russian hackers who had broken into Democratic servers.Though Mr. Trump’s allies have promoted the document, other officials rejected its information after evaluating it, including the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.Mr. McCabe said he had never seen the document before and it was not clear to him that the information alluded to criminal conduct.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former federal prosecutor, defended the F.B.I. for not investigating the claim, noting that even information related to a possible Clinton campaign strategy did not amount to a crime but rather to typical politics.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, also brought up reports that advisers to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. were talking to foreign leaders and compared that to the F.B.I.’s scrutiny of Mr. Flynn in connection with his December 2016 calls with the Russian ambassador during Mr. Trump’s transition.Mr. Cruz demanded to know whether Mr. Biden and his team were violating the Logan Act, a 1799 statute that says it is a crime for a private citizen to interfere with diplomatic relations between the United States and foreign governments. Mr. Cruz eventually pointed out that the Logan Act is widely considered to be unconstitutional, saying that Mr. Biden was therefore not violating it but that it was illegitimate to “go after” Mr. Flynn for the same thing.In a heated exchange with Mr. Cruz, who repeatedly cut him off, Mr. McCabe said that “there were no discussions of the Logan Act” regarding Mr. Flynn, leading Mr. Cruz to suggest that he might be committing perjury. But permitted to complete his answer, Mr. McCabe clarified that agents opened the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn based on something else — a suspicion that he might be a conduit between the campaign and Russia.Notes released in connection with the Justice Department’s attempt to drop the prosecution of Mr. Flynn, despite his guilty plea for lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, have shown that there were discussions of the Logan Act in 2017.In addition, on Tuesday a federal judge unsealed a set of search warrants in connection with the Flynn case in response to a news media request. They showed that by September 2017, when the bureau and Mr. Mueller’s office sought access to devices and email accounts from the Trump transition, it cited the Logan Act and false statements to a judge.“The F.B.I. is investigating whether Flynn corresponded with foreign government officials without the authority of the United States, with intent to influence the conduct of foreign governments, in violation of” the Logan Act, “and whether Flynn made materially false statements and omitted material facts to the F.B.I. regarding his communications with those foreign government officials,” it said.At the end of the hearing. Mr. Graham brushed off the complaints by Democrats that his investigation was pointless. “We are going to keep digging,” he said.Charlie Savage contributed reporting. More

On Saturday morning I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: “Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?”I had to stop and think for a second myself, before answering: “Yes, thou shalt not bear false witness.”The fact that the two of us even momentarily struggled over that question is, for me, the worst legacy of the Trump presidency.You remember the old joke? Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and tells the children of Israel: “Children, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I bargained him down to 10. The bad news is that adultery is still in.”Well, I’ve got bad news and worse news: We’re now down to nine.Yes, this was a historic four years — even one of the Ten Commandments got erased. Lying has been normalized at a scale we’ve never seen before. Hence Ann’s question.I am not sure how we reverse it, but we’d better — and fast.People who do not share truths can’t defeat a pandemic, can’t defend the Constitution and can’t turn the page after a bad leader. The war for truth is now the war to preserve our democracy.It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without sanction. Without truth there is no agreed-upon path forward, and without trust there is no way to go down that path together.But our hole now is so deep, because the only commandment President Trump did believe in was the Eleventh: “Thou shalt not get caught.”Lately, though, Trump and many around him stopped believing even in that — they don’t seem to care about being caught.They know, as the saying goes, that their lies are already halfway around the world before the truth has laced up its shoes. That’s all they care about. Just pollute the world with falsehoods and then no one will know what is true. Then you’re home free.The truth binds you, and Trump never wanted to be bound — not in what he could ask of the president of Ukraine or say about the coronavirus or about the integrity of our election.And it nearly worked. Trump proved over five years that you could lie multiple times a day — multiple times a minute — and not just win election but almost win re-election.We have to ensure that the likes of him never again appear in American politics.Because Trump not only liberated himself from truth, he liberated others to tell their lies or spread his — and reap the benefits. His party’s elders did not care, as long as he kept the base energized and voting red. Fox News didn’t care, as long as he kept its viewers glued to the channel and its ratings high. Major social networks only barely cared, as long he kept their users online and their numbers growing. Many of his voters — even evangelicals — did not care, as long as he appointed anti-abortion judges. They are “pro-life,” but not always pro-truth.For all those reasons, lying is now such a growth industry it deserves its own G.D.P. line: “Auto sales and durables were each down 10 percent last quarter, but lying grew 30 percent and economists predict that the lying industry could double in 2021.”Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey tells the story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.Then a few weeks later his camel was stolen. And the chief told his sons, “Find my turkey.” A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen. His sons shrugged, and the chief repeated, “Find my turkey.”Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and declared: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”And do you know what our turkey was? Birtherism.When Trump was allowed to spread the “birther” lie for years — that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president — he realized he could get away with anything.Sure, Trump eventually gave that one up, but once he saw how easily he could steal our turkey — the truth — he just kept doing it, until he stole the soul of the Republican Party.And, had he been re-elected, he would have stolen the soul of this nation.He and his collaborators are now making one last bid to use the Big Lie to destroy our democracy by delegitimizing one of its greatest moments ever — when a record number of citizens came out to vote, and their votes were legitimately counted, amid a deadly and growing pandemic.It is so corrupt what Trump and his allies are doing, so dangerous to our constitutional system, but you weep even more for how many of their followers have bought into it.“Lies don’t work unless they’re believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible,” my former Times colleague David K. Shipler, who served in our Moscow bureau during the Cold War, said to me. “I think of each of us as having our own alarm — and it’s as if half of their batteries have died. Lots of Trump’s lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd. Why have so many people believed them? I’m not sure it’s fully understood.”That is why it’s vital that every reputable news organization — especially television, Facebook and Twitter — adopt what I call the Trump Rule. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trump’s lie-infested, postelection, news conference last week. If critics scream “censorship,” just shout back “truth.”This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include digital civics — how to determine and crosscheck if something you read on the internet is true — in their curriculum. You should not be able to graduate without it.We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

President-elect Joe Biden says Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election is ‘an embarrassment’. Biden was outlining plans for the transition period before he takes office in January 2020 when he was asked what he would say to Americans anxious over Trump’s refusal to concede and what it would mean for the country. “Well, I just think it’s an embarrassment, quite frankly,” Biden said. “I think it will not help the president’s legacy.” Biden has promised to “get right to work” despite alarm over whether there would be a smooth transition of power
‘An embarrassment’: Joe Biden criticises Trump’s refusal to concede election
Joe Biden says Trump’s refusal to concede defeat ‘an embarrassment’ – live More

The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
“I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
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The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

I came down the stairs, hungover and shattered. I sang a song by The Doors. “This is the end, beautiful friend, the end.”My mother, standing in the kitchen, threw her arms around me, elated and joyful. “This is the beginning,” she sang back to me, although she didn’t know anything about Jim Morrison.That song, “The End,” was already 13 years old by Nov. 5, 1980, but it was everywhere that year, after it was used in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” For me, it was the anthem of the times.My election night party the evening prior had ended before it began. Ronald Reagan had been declared the winner before most of my guests — a cohort consisting largely of my boyfriends from high school — had even arrived. The television anchors started discussing the size of Mr. Reagan’s mandate while California was still voting. It was a wipeout: Jimmy Carter won only six states and the District of Columbia.It was the beginning of the Reagan era, which is what made my Republican mother so happy. But for me — 22 years old and just out of college — it was the end, not just of the Carter presidency, but of childhood too, and the world I thought I’d known.The upheavals of our current era did not begin with Donald Trump, nor will they will end now that he has been defeated. Nov. 4, 1980, was 40 years ago, a long time ago now. But in so many ways the cataclysms of 1980 created the world we live in today.I should have known the world was changing when Mount St. Helens exploded on May 18 of that year. My sister, who lived in Portland, Ore., then, swept some volcanic ash out of her driveway and mailed it to me. I still have those ashes, somewhere.But that wasn’t the only volcanic event of 1980. Mr. Reagan’s insurgency was accompanied by a flip of 12 seats in the Senate, giving the Republicans control of that chamber for the first time since 1952.If you’re a conservative, all of that was great news. I considered myself a moderate then, but I still thought it was a disaster, and not even primarily because I distrusted the theory of trickle-down economics, or “voodoo economics,” as George H.W. Bush accurately called it. But what distressed me wasn’t voodoo. It was the idea, popularized by Mr. Reagan, that government isn’t the solution, that government, in fact, is the problem.No one in her right mind would make the case that government programs are models of efficiency, and I won’t do that now. But the idea that we should therefore conclude that good governance is impossible and that we should place all hopes for improving our lives in the hands of beneficent and loving corporations is absurd. It was absurd then, and it’s absurd today.For the life of me I have never been able to understand how so many Republicans talk about their patriotism and their love of the flag and at the same time despise the very government the Constitution created. Is that what patriotism means now — hating governance, but getting all teary-eyed and sentimental about Exxon Mobil?It’s this enduring frame of mind that still eats away at us. It explains, just to pick one example, Republicans’ hatred of the Affordable Care Act — and why they’ve been trying to repeal it for all these years, even while swearing that they’ll protect so many of its provisions.Because since Mr. Reagan, it’s been apostasy to suggest that good governance could ever do anything to improve people’s lives. Even the resistance to mask-wearing can arguably be traced back to November 1980: Just look at all the people who find that a mandate to wear a mask to keep other people from actually dying is somehow suppression of their freedom.Sure, blame Donald Trump for his inept pandemic response. But blame Ronald Reagan for encouraging people to hate their own government, or to view an individual sacrifice for the common good as some kind of tyranny. The pending erasure of Mr. Trump from the White House means that the tone will change in January, from cruelty to kindness, from narcissism to empathy. But Joe Biden will find it a greater challenge to alter the core belief, now held by so many Americans, that their government is the gravest threat to their freedom.Forty years ago today, Veterans Day 1980, I left my parents’ home and moved to New York City to — I think the phrase is — “seek my fortune.” By the end of that week, I had a new roommate, a young filmmaker named Charlie Kaufman. In months to come, Charlie and I would work on novels and films, each of us at our respective desks, and then head out into the night to close down the bars of Morningside Heights. A very different world had begun — for the country and for me.The day I left home, I had packed up a U-Haul, filled with all of my junk. Suitcases of clothes. Boxes of books and records. My childhood bed. A little plastic bag containing the ashes of a volcano.Just before I drove off, I got down on my knees and hugged my old dog. I’d gotten the dog, named Sausage, for my 11th birthday. Now that dog was gray.My mother burst into tears. “This is the end!” she sang to me, just to prove she’d been listening the week before. “Beautiful friend!”She didn’t sound much like Jim Morrison, but I knew what she meant.“This is the beginning,” I said.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More