Stick with me on this -- it ain't gonna go where most would expect.
BNR is a strange half-MAGA, half-something else mostly normal blog I've been posting at recently. It shut down its posting of news articles as of this morning or sometime last night. Here's BNR's notice.
Based on zero information I instantly strongly suspected two things. First, copyright infringement. Second, the unobvious twist here, Trump and MAGA.
Copyright and the free markets
Recently news media in the UK started getting extremely aggressive about enforcing copyrights of several thousand online UK media sources. That caused BNR to stop posting anything from those sources such as The Independent and The Guardian. In the last few months, ~4-6 months, I've noticed a limiting of free access to US news sources online. Major news and politics-related info content aggregators like r/politics, r/law and r/scotus were posting from a shrinking number of sites where content from articles was still not paywalled. And, many not paywalled places were starting to demand ad blockers to be shut off or no access allowed. Intense economic pressure was closing in on free online content. Lots of sites were putting paywalls in place or forcing people to be subject to endless obnoxious, aggressive and just plain stupid ads.
Trump and MAGA
Authoritarianism, unregulated capitalism
are inherently incompatible with professional journalism
This argument is complicated but can be boiled down to this. Trump and MAGA elites have made very clear, public and undeniable their seething contempt and hate of professional news reporting. The reasons for that are obvious -- honest, professional journalism is a major threat to all kinds of authoritarianism and kleptocracy. Dictators hate it. So to theocrats, oligarchs, military juntas, thieves and rigid ideologues.
Trump's threats to mainstream news and social media sources have been clear, public and aggressive. We all saw how Trump's threats collapsed Jeff Bezos into a steaming pile of complicity with the WaPo, causing that formerly top notch newspaper to die in darkness. We all saw Trump and MAGA elites defund NPR and PBS. We also witnessed a corrupt authoritarian MAGA oligarch force a radical Zionist propagandist, Bari Weiss, to take over at CBS News. Some of you have read PD's brilliant analyses of what is going on with the mainstream media (and some other things), clearly showing a state of collapse from fear of Trump and MAGA, reluctant complicity and probably more than a little sympathetic authoritarian sentiment (analysis 1, analysis 2, analysis 3, analysis 4, analysis 5, analysis 6).
In my firm opinion, we're on our own. No one can save us except ourselves. The MSM is toast. The Democratic Party remains weak, divided, clueless, and I now begin to suspect more than a little sympathetic to authoritarianism and corruption. The Christian church is split, with vast power in its aggressive, bigoted, theocratic Christian nationalism. The real, pro-democracy, tolerant Christians appear to be weak, divided, and confused or paralyzed. Universities have been cowed into complicity. The business community is, or appears to be, mostly cowed into silence or supportive of oligarchy, Christian nationalist theocracy and/or a Trump dictatorship-kleptocracy.
All that's left in defense of democracy appears to be mostly the 2026 mid-term elections. As PD pointed out in his analysis, Trump and MAGA elites are now desperately trying to subvert those elections.
In my opinion, what is happened to BNR fits easily into the larger picture of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism slowly engulfing and smothering what's left of pro-democracy resistance. Instead of government propping up professional reporting and public interest broadcasting, e.g., NPR and PBS, the Trump and his MAGA government are doing their very best to kill as much professional reporting as they can by public threats and whatever else they can do in secrecy. They can do a hell of a lot in secrecy. Essentially all the available evidence points to Trump and MAGA elites doing as much damage to our democracy and rule of law in as much secrecy as they can, as fast as they can.
Q: Has Germaine gone off his meds and started spewing blither and falsehoods like Trump now routinely spews? Or, is there maybe something to the argument that we're in very deep shit with Trump and elite MAGA authoritarianism and corruption?
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