Today's Liberal News

Anti-union consultants do creepy, scummy work, this week in the war on workers

When workers start to organize, one of the first things many companies do is hire an anti-union consultant. Those consultants provide game plans for intimidating or cajoling workers away from solidarity with their coworkers, talking points for managers, and more. A recent report from Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley shows some of the creepy things these union-busters do, like keeping dossiers on workers.

Anti-union consultants do creepy, scummy work, this week in the war on workers

When workers start to organize, one of the first things many companies do is hire an anti-union consultant. Those consultants provide game plans for intimidating or cajoling workers away from solidarity with their coworkers, talking points for managers, and more. A recent report from Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley shows some of the creepy things these union-busters do, like keeping dossiers on workers.

Trump Is Banned. Who Is Next?

It happened slowly, and then all at once. After years of sparring, the internet’s most powerful moderators deplatformed their most famous troll: the president of the United States. Facebook has blocked Donald Trump’s account indefinitely. So have Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify; even one of the Trump campaign’s email providers has cut it off. At the time of writing, Trump still has his YouTube channel, but the company says it is accelerating its enforcement action.

D.C. Statehood Is More Urgent Than Ever

Less than six months before a mob of the sitting president’s supporters would descend upon the United States Capitol, a more solemn crowd gathered at its steps. Among those who arrived to pay their final respects to the late Representative John Lewis were Washington, D.C., residents who appreciated his unwavering support of statehood for the district.

It Was Supposed to Be So Much Worse

On the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday, a man in a pom-pom beanie clamored for blood. “Execute the traitors!” he shouted into a megaphone. “I wanna see executions!”The man got the deaths he wanted, if not the executions. Four rioters died as a result of Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol. The mob beat a police officer with a fire extinguisher, law-enforcement sources reports.

Discovery

Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Lauren Oyler about her writing process. Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. People looked sad on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged.

Lauren Oyler on the Drama of Swiping and Scrolling

Editor’s Note: Read Lauren Oyler’s new fiction, “Discovery.” “Discovery” is taken from Lauren Oyler’s forthcoming novel, Fake Accounts (available on February 2). To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Oyler and Oliver Munday, a senior art director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.Oliver Munday: “Discovery” is an excerpt from your debut novel, Fake Accounts.