On Saturday, April 5, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets across the nation to protest the harmful policies of Donald Trump’s second term. The “Hands Off!” demonstrations represented what organizers called “the largest single day of protest since Trump entered office” with more than 1,100 rallies scheduled in all 50 states.
CNN reported that organizers estimated “millions” turned out coast to coast for these protests that united civil rights organizations, veterans, women’s rights groups, labor unions and LGBTQ advocates. Even with conservative estimates, we’re talking about one of the largest mobilizations in recent American history.
But if you picked up a major print newspaper the next day? You’d barely know it happened.
When hundreds of thousands of people coordinate across an entire nation to protest governmental policies, that’s not a page 18 story. That’s not a “see more in section B” situation. That’s front-page news. Period.
The article reports that the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Boston Globe all mentioned it on the 1st page, but buried the reporting deep in the newspaper. And MAGA thug Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal made absolutely no mention of the protests on either of their April 6 and April 7 front pages. I take this as evidence that the owners of the MSM have decided that reporting about the damage, needless deaths of innocents, and vast corruption that djt and MAGA elites are causing and will cause is to be downplayed as much as possible.
We have lost the core of our 4th estate. Although it was mediocre in the recent past, all that's left of professional journalism now is a weak and fragmented shadow of that mediocre past.
Assessing team democracy and public-interest
So, what's left to defend democracy, competent government, the public interest, the rule of law and our civil liberties? Not much major as far as I can tell. The Republican Party has gone rogue. It's full blown authoritarian MAGA kleptocrat. The Dem Party is melted down and either useless or worse than useless. The Christian church has thrown most of its power on the side of djt and MAGA elites, i.e., the Christian nationalist wing of American Christianity.
The federal courts have collapsed and gone authoritarian and kleptocratic. The most recent rejection of the rule of law being a USSC decision to not force djt to obey the law. Chief justice Roberts "temporarily" lifted order requiring Trump administration to un-deport Dilmar Abrego Garcia from his shockingly illegal detention in a prison in El Salvador by midnight tonight. The 1 page order is shown below, no explanation is given.
Roberts lets djt break the law with complete
impunity and no explanation to the public
The FBI and DoJ are subverted and deeply corrupted in favor of djt and MAGA elites. I suspect that most of state law enforcement is sympathetic to MAGA and authoritarianism. Wall Street multi-millionaires aren't protesting. Universities are collapsing into complicit silence. Big law firms are capitulating and paying djt off (free services worth tens of millions) so that he backs off of them. A few rank and file djt voters might be waking up to a modest extent, but most still love the guy. They think he's a fracking patriot and a horribly wronged victim of DEI, an evil socialist cabal, the high price of eggs or whatever is in their stunningly deceived minds.
Q: Who or what major source of wealth and power is left to protect democracy, competent government, the public interest, the rule of law and our civil liberties?
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TNR incoherently reports an incoherent moral mess (interview transcript -- no, most djt voters are not shocked, at least not yet):
Trump Voters Suddenly Shocked at How Badly He Screwed Them
Chinese markets are important to all Americans, but the impact, as you suggest, may be disproportionate for rural communities. Rural communities, of course, are much more dependent on so-called extractive economies—mining and farming particularly—and they tend to have more heavy industry. That’s because you can’t have major plants and stuff in [urban] and suburban areas because of zoning and property cost reasons.When Paul and I wrote the book, we got tons of angry emails from people, and the general form of that is I hope you don’t need to eat or drive your car ever again because energy is produced in rural America and all your food and meals are produced here. Now that’s a bit of a stretch. And of course, in any economy—so what? You can make potatoes and sell them to me, and people in the cities can make electronics and sell them to you. Nobody and no liberal or no Democrat ever says to rural America, Hey, you don’t make MRIs or put people through MRIs, you got to come into the big city and see the doctor so I hope you don’t get sick, because that’s how an economy works. We don’t expect every community to make every product.Underscoring the point is the fact that, as you point out, the government last time spent tens of billions of dollars to bail out farmers. Now the Trump administration is reportedly mulling another aid package for farmers. Now this is a tacit admission that they know their policies will absolutely devastate farm country.When we say they’re voting against their interests, I think we have to be very clear. I don’t think when they vote for somebody like Trump, or George W. Bush for that matter or Mitt Romney, they’re voting against many of their social and cultural interests. They may simply apply greater salience or weight to [social and cultural interests] than they do their ability to cover their health care costs or their ability to limit their co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses or their tax rates or their local industries.
On the economic side of the equation, I do think they are voting, in many cases, against their economic interest. And this is a serious problem. And I think Democrats and liberals are on the horns of a dilemma between saying, Ha ha ha, FAFO*, you fucked around and now you found out, and, You vote for what you got and you got what you voted for, and, as Mencken said, You’re going to get your democracy good and hard here, which is not a very empathetic or liberal attitude in the broadest sense. But of course, these people are voting against the economic interests of the rest of America and denigrating suburbanites and urbanites and criticizing them.* FAFO = fuck around, find outHow should Democrats talk to rural Americans about this? How do they go into red America, into some of these swingy House districts, ....? They try to talk in the same language that Trump talked about during the election, right? And maybe like Trump, they exaggerate a little bit about the prices of things. Trump has lied consistently.The problem is where they get their information. I spent time in rural Pennsylvania the weekend before the election and in places like Cumberland and Lancaster. We didn’t see Republicans out in the streets, because they don’t really do field campaigns anymore. It’s all digital and electronic and through people’s phones, not through people’s front doors. ..... Democrats got to get on these local radio shows. They have to create their own local radio shows. They have to get on these podcasts because they’re living in an informational vacuum or a silo, so they’re not hearing these messages anyway.
As we’ve seen on Bluesky today, Fox News and OANN are not even putting the market reports up there. They know that their listeners and viewers cannot handle any negative news. They need to be constantly reinforced with nonstop pro-red, pro-Republican, pro-Trump, pro-MAGA news because they can’t handle the truth, as Jack Nicholson would say. We need to break through that and force them to listen to alternative messages, but that is a really, really difficult nut to crack. (emphases added)
And the reason that most djt voters are not shocked is because they are not aware of the many reasons to be shocked. Fox News, OANN and the rest of the MAGA demagoguery Leviathan are never going to tell them the whole truth. That is fact, not opinion.
Q: Is our situation so dire that Dems need to resort to in-kind demagoguery with MAGA demagoguery, or something close to it? Do the Dems need to lie like djt and MAGA, or do they need to stick with fact and truth, but up their crappy messaging game a whole lot (being aware of the subtle line between psyops to inform vs psyops to mentally manipulate)?
