This is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money.
“Cognitive decline” and “disinhibition,” all too often, become our ritual alibi for how effectively Trump was inviting his supporters to revel in the pleasure of his unmitigated cruelty, licensing them to practice such cruelty themselves—which they are now all too free to do. What do we do with that knowledge? I don’t have any good idea. All I know is that, first, we have to acknowledge that it’s true.
Yesterday I highlighted Timothy Snyder's New Yorker essay on Trump's fascism and what it means for America. Snyder's last line, "Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side," is a segue to today's American Prospect commentary – a stark warning about some on-the-ground consequences. Most of Perlstein's piece describes one of Dear Leader's most horrific rallies during the campaign. He puts the deliberate vileness of Trump's technique into historical context, and asks us to recognize that cult leaders don't just have willing followers; they have willing-to-take-ordersfollowers. Let's connect some dots. Trump is installing loyal apparatchiks in the highest offices military and law-enforcement departments of government. They can't wait to use government to punish the "enemy within" that Trump has fingered. Meanwhile, his cult has a high propensity for violence. There are countless guns in America, and his supporters own many if not most of them. And some of them are just itching to pull triggers on his (and their own feverished) behalf. When Perlstein says Trump is inviting his cult to "practice such cruelty themselves," and that we have to acknowledge it, he's understating things. Yes, we have to talk about it. I also want to know: Who's preparing for it, to protect us, and how?
I'm so fucking tired of being told to calm down about this as we stare down the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives (both physical and digital), with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job of explaining what's being done to people in an ideologically consistent way. I'm angry, and I don't know why you're not.
Zitron's newsletter is one of the best, and this incendiary piece needs to be read widely. I don't agree with everything he says, but his overarching point – for all of the essential and useful things that technology enables, the industry has become a malevolent and massively dangerous force in our society – is inescapable. He has special contempt for what he calls "legacy" media/journalism, which I very much share. He doesn't have the answer to all of this, but he does offer some suggestions that, if people took him up on them, would improve things. So please pass it around and, while you're at it, subscribe to his work.
During Donald Trump's first term, one of his most influential advisors was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Now that Trump has won another term, Kushner seems poised to reprise this role. Except this time, instead of being an employee of the federal government, he will be on the payroll of Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.
Everything about Donald Trump – and almost everyone around him – reeks of corruption, and these observations in Popular Information lay out just one (egregious) example. The $3 billion that his son-in-law scored from Middle East autocrats looks more like a payoff, or a bribe, than any kind of traditional investment. Then again, think of the benefits those corrupt governments may get; they may well see it as a different kind of investment. Trump was by far the most corrupt president in American history during his first term, and there will be orders of magnitude more corruption this time around. Our (also corrupt) Supreme Court basically legalized political bribery during its last term, and gave Trump immunity from prosecution for the crimes he'll commit while in the White House.
The sympathy that so many ultra-rich funders have for Trump explains the otherwise shocking silence of Jewish organizations in the wake of Trump’s Nazi-style pre-election hatefest at Madison Square Garden. “There’s no question about it: For the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, Conference of Presidents, the federations, all these institutes,” Foxman said, “if this happened six months ago, they would be out there condemning racism and antisemitism and hate speech.”
What’s true of The New Republic is true of other magazines dedicated to liberalism and/or the left: Mother Jones, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, The Washington Spectator, Jacobin, Liberties, Democracy, The Progressive. (If there’s a single liberal magazine in America that isn’t on Twitter I don’t know it.) I’ve written or worked for some of these publications. Shame on all of us. Shame, too, on conservative publications that remain on Twitter like National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. Their opinion of Musk and Trump is higher than mine, but not by a lot. Continued association with Twitter soils them too. Shame, too, on any individual writers, academics, book publishers, and other honorable people, many of them personal friends, who continue to post on Twitter. Everybody is asking: What can I do to defend the principles under attack right now in the United States? You can get the hell off Twitter. Remaining there hasn’t been the moral choice for some time, but it really can’t be defended now. Please make this small sacrifice. If you can’t, what use will you be when the challenges get tougher? Because believe me: They will.
We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.
I suppose I should welcome the grotesquely belated recognition from some media organizations and journalists that supporting a Trump world by supporting its key online platform is a bad idea. So fine, one cheer to them, on the principle that it's better to do the right thing late than never. In this case, though, late means too late to matter much.
Separately, I should let you know that I'd kept an account live at Twitter for two purposes: 1) to keep some troll from scooping up my username; and 2) to very occasionally implore honorable journalists to leave that toxic site. I deactivated the account yesterday, with a sense of relief. If you see a tweet with the username "dangillmor" in the future, please understand that IT IS NOT ME.
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Rick Perlstein
Edward Zitron
Judd Legum
Eric Alterman
Timothy Noah
The Guardian
