Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Paul Krugman: Pumps and Dumps and Chumps

Please, stop falling for fake populism.

In a more reasonable world, hardly anyone would care about the ups and downs of a smallish retailer’s stock price. Even near the top of its Reddit-fueled roller coaster, GameStop accounted for only about 0.06 percent of the total value of U.S. stocks. Furthermore, the stock market itself is mainly a sideshow to the real economy.

But we don’t live in a reasonable world, we live in a world where the GameStop story briefly commanded global attention. And the craziness did offer some important lessons — not so much about economics and markets as about psychology and politics.

For it turns out that despite four years of Donald Trump, our society remains remarkably gullible. And it is not just members of the public who believe what they see on social media; far too many influential people still keep falling for fake populism. [..]

So what was all that about? Social media acted as an accelerant, but the basic story of what happened is a very old one. This was basically a pump and dump, with a side order of predatory trading.

Eugene Robinson: Bipartisanship is nice, but you can’t negotiate with fantasy and lies

Democrats can only negotiate if Republicans bring serious proposals to the table.

Maybe someday the old way of framing our political debate — chastising “both sides” for not seeking “bipartisan” accord through “give-and-take compromise” — will once again make sense. But not now, and probably not for some time to come. There are no productive deals to broker between objective reality and cynical fantasy, between truth and lies.

President Biden and the slim Democratic majorities in Congress are right to move ahead on a proposed $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief bill, even if Republicans refuse to come along. The necessary arguments about how much money is really needed and how it will be spent are still taking place. It’s just that the Republican Party will not — and, apparently, cannot — meaningfullyparticipate.

The Oval Office meeting this week between Biden and 10 Republican senators was a worthwhile exercise in performative bipartisanship, a demonstration that such encounters are once again possible. But everyone in the room had to know that the GOP offer of $618 billion was not a serious opening bid. For example, the Republicans would provide no help at all for state and local governments, whose coffers the pandemic has starved and drained; Biden wants to give them $350 billion. The GOP plan was more of an aspirational gesture — and partly, perhaps, a cry for help.

Catherine Rampell: Trump created a toxic environment for immigrants. Biden must remedy that.

What it will take to reverse the climate of terror and misinformation left behind by the Trump administration.

Amid a public health crisis, parents are turning down free health care for their kids. Amid a hunger crisis, families are refusing food stamps and free baby formula.

These families aren’t declining public assistance out of pride. They’re doing so out of fear.

This is the enduring climate of terror and misinformation left behind by the Trump administration — specifically by a regulation designed to scare immigrants and their extended families away from critical safety-net services. (Even if the person getting the benefits would be an impoverished U.S.-born child, legally entitled to help.) President Biden signed an executive order this week directing government agency heads to “review” the policy; ultimately, though, undoing the rule’s damage will require not just rewriting the regulation but basically sending an exuberant love letter to immigrants.

This is not only the morally right thing to do. It’s also necessary for curbing the pandemic, and its many related crises.

Several years ago, the Trump administration began leaking drafts of a rule it was readying that would deny immigrants green cards or other visas if they had been or might someday become a burden on taxpayers — formally known as a “public charge.” Simply put, this was a solution in search of a problem. Comprehensive studies have found that immigrants actually pay more in federal taxes than they receive in benefits. In fact, noncitizens (those here legally or otherwise) generally aren’t even eligible for public benefits, except under extremely limited circumstances.

So the Trump officials proposed broadening who or what counted as a taxpayer burden.

Amanda Marcotte: Don’t blame a lack of education — QAnon proves privileged white people are losing their minds too

QAnon should be the death knell of the idea that wealth and education can insulate people from conspiracy theories

In the weeks after Donald Trump sent a violent mob to rampage the U.S.  Capitol on January 6, a lot of focus has risen on the role played by QAnon and other lurid conspiracy theories in radicalizing Republicans. Unfortunately, a lot of that discourse has centered around the idea that QAnon and similar conspiracy theories are the result of poor education or economic stress. Blame it on years of misleading media coverage misattributing the rise of Trumpism on “economic anxiety.” Sadly, even Democratic leadership has slipped up and drawn a false equation between educational privilege and immunity to QAnon-style conspiracy theories.

“They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both,” Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Politico in an interview published Tuesday.  [..]

This framing isn’t just likely to backfire on Democrats, it’s also flat-out untrue. There is no reason to believe that QAnon is the result of a lack of educational opportunities. As with the Trumpism that gave birth to QAnon, the phenomenon is the result largely of privileged white people losing their minds because of perceived threats to their social status from people of color and cosmopolitan liberals.