News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Turning universities into right-wing propaganda factories
The authoritarian parallels
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.
THE COURTS WEREN’T ALONE in failing to hold Trump to account. There are the Republicans in Congress, whose senators refused to convict Trump after a half-hearted impeachment “trial” for his role in January 6th, citing a procedural technicality. In an infamous speech from the Senate floor, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell left it to the courts to save the nation from more Trumpian destruction. His gamble failed miserably, and he has stood by while Trump swallowed his party whole. And then, of course, there are the voters, who by a razor-thin margin put Trump back in the White House to do more untold damage to individual lives, America’s standing in the world, the economy, the rule of law, and the Constitution itself.
Jack Smith's dropping of the federal charges against our criminal-in-chief were no surprise, any more than the staggering sloth the Biden administration's attorney general displayed in waiting until far too late to get the criminal justice system moving against our next president. This Bulwark piece lays out only part of the sick litany, however.
At every step during Trump's adult life, he has been immune from consequences for his endless wrongdoing. Business associates kept him going even when he cheated them and the taxpayers. Criminal justice officials in New York city and state ignored his flagrant misdeeds for decades. When New York finally prosecuted Trump for one relatively obscure piece of his financial sleaze, it was way too little, way too late. Georgia prosecutors stepped on their own election-tampering case with obviously improper personal behavior.
Only a few civil actions led to actual penalties along the way. Now the boss has won immunity for all crimes he commits in office, courtesy of his wholly owned and monumentally corrupt Supreme Court, which essentially changed the Constitution to make it happen. And throughout his career, Big Journalism protected and normalized him – even during a campaign when he vowed to be a dictator and punish news people. Guardrails? Accountability? Not for this raging, dangerous crook.
Is it too late? I hope not. But one way democracy dies is when the people who should be protecting it, by holding its enemies accountable, can't be bothered to care.
Gaetz’s departure from the scene may, for some, suggest a reassertion of norms, a breaking wave of backlash that might sweep Hegseth’s nomination away with the Florida sex pest. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I think not. Hegseth might survive based on the same reasons that Trumpworld has been hitherto unmoved by protests (made on both the right and left) that Hegseth is singularly unqualified to run the Pentagon—the country’s largest employer, a nation within a nation with its own mail delivery service, judicial code, legal system, and health care delivery apparatus. Seizing what others would deny you or say you don’t deserve is the whole point of Trumpism. Hegseth’s sexual misconduct isn’t a drawback to be judged against his lickspittle loyalty, it’s an essential part of the audition.
This New Republic commentary reminds us about an aspect of the Trump "team" that needs to be stated again and again: Corruption (financial, moral, whatever) doesn't disqualify the job candidate. It's a calling card. Each separate announcement may feel like a nasty jolt, but you need to keep it in context.
Even for an Israeli government that has declared its commitment to wrecking democratic institutions right from the moment it was established in December 2022, the legislative onslaught now underway is extraordinary. The Knesset session that began in late October has seen lawmakers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition unleash a methodical, multidirectional attack on Israel's institutions, in more explicit terms than ever.
Netanyahu knows that a free, critical press is an essential pillar of democracy, and that is why he sees it as a threat that must be eradicated. "The government supports a free press and the media's freedom of expression even in wartime," the cabinet decision said, with characteristic cynicism. But in Netanyahu's view, freedom of expression and freedom of the press mean freedom to praise the leader and repeat his talking points. He thinks all media outlets should be like Channel 14 television, which Karhi, the regulator, seeks to indulge and strengthen.
It's important to remind ourselves that this moment of peril for American democracy is mirrored in many of not most of the world's democracies. One of those is Israel, which under Netanyahu and a radical-right government is rapidly converting the nation to what Haaretz – one of Israel's most reputable news outlets – calls "Bibi-ism" in today's editorial, some details of which you'll find in an op-ed writer's commentary. The defense of such draconian measures, the latest of which is a move to punish journalists for doing their jobs, is a simple one: This is wartime, and that means whatever the government deems necessary is what must happen. America hasn't been fastidious about protecting human rights, or shy about censoring journalism, during our own wars. So give some thought to what's coming next year when Trump and his apparatchiks tell us that they are at war with the "enemies within" they invented during the campaign.
Technology is replacing workers through automation. It already regulates them. In the future, it will replicate them. And the question of whether a worker should be scanned and replicated should not come down to a three-part legal test. Workers need strong, bright line protections against this conduct – and they need them soon. Right now, there are two roads to get those kinds of protections. The first is collective bargaining. The Screen Actors Guild won strong protections to ensure that digital replicas would not be made of actors without their knowing about it, agreeing to it, and being paid for it. The Communications Workers of America have made sure that emotion analysis software can’t be used to punish or discipline their workers. The second path is through the passage of a workplace privacy law.
This is a fantastic speech by a member of the Federal Trade Commission. He goes to the core of the most modern kinds of workplace abuses by tech-infused employers: use of workers' data and skills to regulate and replace them, and to steal all semblance of privacy as they do it. The commissioner's logic fails near the end when he suggests that people at home have some data privacy, when it's more and more obvious that tech companies and data mongers have eviscerated it, while Congress has done almost nothing in response. Meanwhile, the Trump administration may ignore the worries even of some of its own supporters by eviscerating any possible regulation or enforcement. Read it anyway, because this is a call to attention, and someday action, that makes too much sense to be buried forever. (Note: h/t to Cory Doctorow, who entertainingly discusses the speech and puts it in broader context in his latest blog post.)
Kim Wehle
Ana Marie Cox
Dahlia Scheindlin
Haaretz Editorial
Bureau of Competition
