News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Turning universities into right-wing propaganda factories
The authoritarian parallels
A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You will rarely find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's – and the world's – future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
I and our journalism team at the Mississippi Free Press will stand in the breach to report the truth and support humanity and freedom as long as possible no matter what happens on Election Day. Kimberly Griffin and I did not start the MFP nearly five years ago to lie down as democracy is destroyed or to help drive the damn fascism tanks that will destroy free thought and a free press. I’m shocked that any U.S. media outlet would. Silence is acquiescence when you trade in words. I will continue to fight fascism and for humanity and freedom with my words and knowledge of history because it’s the tools I have and know. As I tweeted earlier today, “if you don’t have the balls to challenge fascism, then don’t run a newsroom.” There is no freedom without a free press and access to ideas beyond hate. And freedom is not real if we’re not willing to fight for it.
As America's democracy teeters, and as fascists gather in Madison Square Garden for their sick replay of a 1939 Nazi rally, the founder and CEO of the tiny but superb Mississippi Free Press offers a history lesson, a stark warning, and a vow to resist. She and her staff have more courage than the combined Washington Post and LA Times, whose billionaire owners disgracefully ordered editorial writers not to publish Harris endorsements. Please read her piece and share it widely. (Note: I've been donating to the nonprofit MFP since its founding, and hope you'll become a supporter, too.)
Trump’s opponents are using the rally as proof of the former president’s divisiveness, going as far as likening the rhetoric from Sunday’s rally to the sinister 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same venue. “My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”
It doesn't get much more stark than this. Trump's rally did, indeed, bring to mind the infamous Nazi gathering in 1939. He is a fascist, pure and simple. The campaign was perfectly aware of the rally's sounding back to even uglier times, and no one should be in the slightest doubt about that. As a reminder:
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
A brilliant piece by Jonathan Last, a must-read to put the Bezos betrayal in perspective. Some personal history: Back in the days when I was writing a column at the San Jose Mercury News, actively engaging with the tech industry, I got to know Jeff Bezos a bit. I liked him, and in the early years of his company I was amazed by his drive to create something unprecedented – and admired him for telling Wall Street's short-term-focused analysts to get lost while he poured revenue and profits back into building Amazon. After I left the journalism business I even bought a small amount of the company's stock, which I've used over the years to give money to charities I support. I stopped admiring the businessman when he became the exemplar of how corporate power can wreck competition and pound employees into the ground, but was glad when he bought the Post because I thought he meant it when he said he'd support the journalism and not interfere with editorial decisions. Stupid me. He will go down in history as one of the most cynical oligarchs (that's redundant, I guess) we've ever seen. Not that he would care, but I just canceled Amazon Prime.
A big slice of American is living in a climate of deepening bewilderment. That’s basically Blue America, civic America and the more politicized part of the group I’m describing. This bewilderment is tied to the role of billionaires in public life, the role of Donald Trump in our public life, but it goes beyond both. The expanding story of Elon Musk is a key predicate. On one level he’s another in that history of outlandish captains of industry with crankish or malign politics. Henry Ford is an obvious analogue from a century ago. But Musk’s current role in public life goes far beyond that. He is simultaneously operating in the domains of heavy industry, communications, national security and partisan politics in a way that appears to have placed him entirely outside the bounds even of the rather limited public accountability we now feel we can expect.
Josh Marshall connects some dots here as he shows how Bezos and Musk are exemplars of the billionaires' metastasizing (my word, not his) prominence and power. They are, in every way, the kind of oligarchs who took over Russia's business and wealth – or thought they did – when Putin came into power. They came under the dictator's thumb before long, as Trump would inevitably do here. For now, they are effectively unaccountable even under Democrats, which is scary as hell. I don't understand why this isn't freaking more Americans out.
But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn. The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it.
If Bart Gellman can be this confident about the security of the 2024 elections, I'm going to relax just a bit. He is the single best journalist on these issues, from my perspective. He had prescient warnings four years ago, and said after the election and Jan. 6 that the Trump cult were using that election cycle's coup attempt as practice for a future coup. We're far from being out of the woods this time, but his arsenal of facts and anecdotes is persuasive. Read it.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
Take your personal contact list, compare it to the national voter file, and find out which of your actual friends, family, co-workers and past acquaintances live in swing states and districts where a call or text from you could be hugely influential.
Please read Micah Sifry's advice – and heed it! You still have time to make a huge difference.
Please send your suggestions
I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
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Donna Ladd
Jonathan V. Last
Micah L. Sifry
