A strong, accurate opinion about the failing mainstream media

It is comforting to see a slow increase in heads with hair on fire, like mine has been for the last ~6-7 years. This hair on fire opinion comes from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch:

With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy

News organizations are using cowardly words to describe killing abroad, fascism at home — downplaying the danger to democracy

There was a shocking and incredibly important story on the front page of the New York Times last week. As reported by an A-team of journalists including two Pulitzer Prize winners, the Times warned its readers that Donald Trump — if returned to the White House in 2025 — is grooming a new team of extremist government lawyers who would be more loyal to their Dear Leader than to the rule of law, and could help Trump install a brand of American fascism.

You say you didn’t hear anything about this? That’s not surprising. The editors at the Times made sure to present this major report in the blandest, most inoffensive way possible — staying true to the mantra in the nation’s most influential newsroom that the 2024 election shouldn’t be covered any differently, even when U.S. democracy is on the line.

“Trump Allies Want a New Style of Lawyer if He Returns to Power,” was the original online headline for the piece, as if maybe they were talking about colorful drawling Southerners with seersucker suits, rather than rabid-dog ideologues who would do the dirty work of overturning an election that career government attorneys refused to do before Jan. 6, 2021.

That “new style of lawyer” — pro-Trump, “America First” zealots who think the ultraconversative lawyers bred in the Federalist Society are too soft to carry out their leader’s autocratic call for a “final battle” against traditional democratic governance that he calls “the deep state” — was described, numbingly, by the Times as “more aggressive legal gatekeepers.” Their dangerous antidemocratic mission was blandly outlined as a plan to “take control of the government in a way unseen in presidential history.”

I’m picking on this one article in the Times, and its timid, inoffensive packaging, not because it is unique, but because it is far too typical right now. In one of the most perilous moments of crisis the world has seen in 75 years, and with the basic notions of free speech under assault, most newsrooms aren’t fighting back. They are, instead, pulling their punches in a defensive, “rope-a-dope” crouch, and thus failing to truly inform — when democracy itself is at risk.

This NYT story uses overly tidy language. I’ll translate.

“A new style of lawyer” = fascist lawyers

“Aggressive legal gatekeepers” = Roy Cohn-style crooked lawyers

“take control of the government in a way unseen in presidential history” = overthrow democracy pic.twitter.com/kntes5ikOW— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) November 1, 2023

Right now, Ground Zero is the horrific conflict in the Middle East, where bombing by Israel in response to a violent Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7 is killing thousands of children, yet too many newsrooms adopt a passive voice to describe the bloodshed or who is to blame for attacks. It can be hard at times to distinguish what is real — “Explosion at Gaza refugee camp leaves massive crater,” was the BBC headline for an Israeli bombing that killed or wounded scores of civilians — and what is satire. The Onion’s take — “The Onion Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble That Way” — felt more honest and heartful than many serious-news headlines.

What worries me even more, frankly, is how the push not to offend with Middle East news coverage is emblematic of a bigger trend of newsroom timidity and even rank cowardice that also permeates domestic news coverage, at a moment when right-wing extremists are controlling the U.S. House and are on track to regain the White House and full governmental control in a chaotic election year.

The mainstream, elite media seems especially flummoxed by the new Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson was an obscure back-bencher on Capitol Hill and remains a man of mystery with no apparent bank account or tangible assets. But the extremism of his Christian nationalist views — more radical than anything seen in American history — are no secret. Johnson believes that our country should be ruled by his own brand of religious fundamentalism which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old but inspires hateful policies toward the LGBTQ community and fringe opposition to women’s abortion rights.

That danger isn’t conveyed in business-as-usual fluff pieces like the Washington Post’s “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family” article in which neighbors hailed the softer side of a man who was at the center of schemes to block the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Another Post piece questioned whether Democrats could truly make a political boogeyman out of Johnson given “his low profile and quiet tone” — as if Christo-fascism isn’t so bad when delivered in a gentle drawl, from behind oversized dad glasses.

This deference to authority is already bleeding into serious policy coverage. Far too many news outlets uncritically repeated Johnson’s first major pronouncement — that $14 billion for Israel could be paid for by cutting the number of IRS agents (who audit the GOP’s millionaire donors), when even a third-grade math student would know that reducing revenue agents would cost the government money. Getting it right isn’t only important because Johnson is now the most powerful Republican in Washington, but also because he’s a kind of a John-the-Baptist prophecy of an even more dangerous Trump 47 in 14-plus months.

It’s weird because Trump is arguably the most media-covered figure in American history — even now, there’s an entire TV network built around covering his legal woes, in MSNBC — and yet there’s not nearly enough coverage of the stakes of his proposed second term. This includes an assault on democratic institutions and agencies in the guise of “dismantling the deep state,” a focus on political revenge that would include pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists while his Justice Department pursued political rivals, and brutal policies toward the marginalized such as refugees or the urban homeless.

The world is staring into an abyss, much as it did in the 1930s. Now, as then, the global rise of right-wing authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is linked to aggressive militarism that targets civilians and risks a world war. Here at home, the growing sense of chaos abroad and a broken government on Capitol Hill, with Republican Johnson poised to make matters worse, has imperiled the flawed small-d democratic government of President Joe Biden and has primed too many voters to fall into the waiting arms of a wannabe dictator.

Yet the news rarely reflects the reality, or this risk. Why is that?

It’s not that there aren’t a lot of remarkable individual journalists out there doing some remarkable and at times courageous work, exposing the rot in Capitol Hill or risking their lives to bring news from Israel and Gaza, where at least 36 reporters or photojournalists have paid with their lives. But the institutional caution that frames their work has been getting a lot worse. Some of it is probably business-driven — to avoid offending readers who might cancel a subscription. A lot of it seems a desire in newsrooms, after Trump’s whirlwind, lie-filled first term, to return to normalcy and the kind of balance that treats the two parties equally, which means ignoring that one has become an authoritarian cult.  

We are at war, dammit, literally and figuratively, and we can’t win this fight by hiding in the corner and absorbing the punches. There is a higher truth that doesn’t repeat lies but calls them out, doesn’t hide from accountability when there is blame to be assigned, and uses the keyboard as a weapon to fight for democracy instead of dispassionately reporting, evenhandedly, on its slow death. And if we don’t start fighting for that truth right away, the BBC might eventually be reporting on “the crater” where a free press used to stand.

Ah, that feels good. 👍 Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The US military and war: Arrogant, callous and expensive

A NYT article discusses injury to US Army and Marine troops who suffer from what appears to be serious, irreparable brain injuries from shock waves caused by firing thousands of heavy artillery rounds at the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2016:

To defeat ISIS, the United States relied on artillery crews firing more intensively than any had in generations.

The big howitzers used in the height of the offensive against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, from 2016 to 2017, could hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and gun crews fired them almost nonstop, day and night for weeks on end.

The strategy worked as intended, and the Islamic State was soon smashed to near oblivion. But keeping the number of U.S. troops involved to a minimum meant that each gun crew had to fire thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds than any American gun crew had fired at least since the Vietnam War. Some troops fired more than 10,000 rounds in just a few months.

Many members of the gun crews developed devastating and puzzling symptoms.

Members of the gun crews started to have memory and balance problems, nausea, irritability and crushing fatigue. Those symptoms were signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after working 20-hour days in the desert and sleeping in foxholes. Crews trained to endure didn’t complain.

The crews were screened for signs of brain injuries after deployment, but those screenings were designed to spot the effects of much larger explosions from enemy attacks — not repeated exposure to blast waves from routine firing of weapons. Few of the troops screened positive.

Crew members who were told they were healthy struggled to understand why they were stalked by panic and sleeplessness. Some thought they were going insane.

When the troops started to act strangely, they were often treated ineffectively or punished.

Nothing in the gun crew members’ records suggested they had ever been exposed to damaging blasts in combat, so when some sought medical help from the military, doctors repeatedly failed to consider the possibility of a brain injury.

When job performance deteriorated or behavior turned erratic, many crew members were seen not as wounded, but as problems. They were passed over for promotion or punished for misconduct. Some were forced out of the service with punitive discharges and cut off from veterans’ health care.

Their problems have spilled over into civilian life, wrecking marriages and making it hard to hold down jobs. Some are now homeless. A striking number have died by suicide. Many still have no idea that their problems may stem from blast exposure.

Studies are starting to reveal the risk posed by blast exposure, but progress is slow.

Research suggests that repeated exposure to the blast waves generated by firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable microscopic damage to the brain. Vast numbers of military veterans may have been affected.

But the damage is nearly impossible to document, because no brain scan or blood test now in use can detect those minute injuries in a living brain. Making diagnosis more complicated, many of the symptoms can be identical to those of P.T.S.D.

As things now stand, the microscopic damage from blast exposure can only be definitively documented by examining thin slices of brain tissue under a microscope once someone has died. Tissue samples taken from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to blasts during their military careers show a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

The Army and the Marine Corps both say that they now have programs to track and limit daily exposure for troops. But Marines in the field say they have not seen the new safety programs, and troops throughout the military are still training with weapons that the Defense Department is concerned may pose a risk.

The costs of modern American wars last a lifetime. American war is shockingly expensive. Costs include human, economic and social damage to the economy, society and soldiers and their families for their entire lives. I suspect it also causes some damage to democracy.

An analysis of Iraq war cost:

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.** But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

** We were lied to.

Brown University data

This also means that the US is still incurring costs from the catastrophic Vietnam war. A 2022 analysis asserts that (1) based on the current dollar value, the Vietnam War cost the equivalent of about $1 trillion, and (2) the US pays $22 billion per year in war compensations to Vietnam veterans and their families.

In defense of beleaguered democracy and truth: Another warning and an example

The warning

Terrible thinking and tactics by America's ARR (authoritarian radical right) are worsening fast. A long, detailed NYT opinion by Damon Linker includes this warning (opinion not behind paywall):

We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.

But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?

A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

The Claremont Catastrophists

Probably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

The Christian Reverse Revolutionaries

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism.  

...... 

Some will undoubtedly suggest we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed about such trends. These are just a handful of obscure writers talking to one another, very far removed from the concerns of Republican officeholders and rank-and-file voters.

But such complacency follows from a misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals in radical political movements. These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. ....

The example

Salon writes about antics that Trump's attorneys are increasingly engaging in to derail the New York civil fraud trial. If Trump loses this case, it could bankrupt him. What his attorneys are doing is now openly attacking the judge in court filings and making false statements in open court directly to the judge. Trump is trying to make the judge lose emotional control and react in a way that provides an opportunity for Trump to get his case dismissed for bias and misconduct by the judge. Trump is openly baiting the judge.

I am not aware of such open, direct attacks in past court cases, although it's possible some of this has happened in the past. But what this example represents is a complete breakdown of norms and decorum in defense of how the courts work. This is what a direct attack on democracy looks like.

Salon writes:

“Absolutely untrue”: Judge shames Trump lawyer for using 

Breitbart article to attack clerk in court

Trump lawyer threatened to push for mistrial after citing complaint from Twitter user "applying the 69th Amendment"

[On Friday] Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron opened by raising his concerns about the former president and his legal team's jabs at Engoron's principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, over their perceptions of "bias."

“I’m worried about this,” Engoron told the defense, according to The Daily Beast.

“To the extent that there is the perception of bias,” Trump lawyer Chris Kise replied, he needed to “as a lawyer… at least mark it.”

Engoron said he didn't consider the case to be political and “promised not to pound the table again, the bench.” But he reiterated a Thursday assertion that he had an “unfettered right to get assistance” from his clerk, who sits at his side on the bench, and explained he had "no idea" how that act demonstrates bias.

“You can say whatever you want about me,” he said. “And that has been taken advantage of. I think that’s where there would be any appearance of bias, but I cut this case right down the middle.”

In response, Kise dove into a rant about how the matter was "treading in a dangerous area."

“The entire country, if not the world, is watching this proceeding,” Kise argued. “And the U.S. heretofore has been a model for integrity and impartiality in the judicial system, since its founding. Nothing in here should create any appearance that the adherence to those principles has wavered… Yes, as a judge you’re entitled to receive [assistance], but from someone who has potentially demonstrable bias… and the manner in which that has taken place, we at least have to make a record.”

Kise rehashed the same argument he made at the end of the day Thursday, griping about how “things are frequently, if not inordinately, against us on every major issue.” He said he felt as if he were taking on “two adversaries, not one,” and referenced a Thursday night article calling for Greenfield to be disbarred because of her political donations to Democrats.

The allegations in the article, he said were, "delivered to the court" on Friday morning, asserting that he may move for a mistrial and adding that the same "information" about "extrajudicial conduct” was brought up last month.

"It's not information, it's an allegation," Engoron fired back, saying that he had no idea what article Kise was referring to and hadn't seen it.

Though he admitted to not remembering the specific publication, Kise said he thought it "may be Breitbart," which is a website once run by Trump's ex-strategist Steve Bannon. The Daily Beast confirmed that the story in question was a "thinly sourced Breitbart article about a complaint filed by a Wisconsin man not involved in the trial."

Specifically, the article is sourced entirely to an X/Twitter user from Wisconsin whose account bio reads, "Applying the 69th Amendment to the Internet!" according to The Messenger. That user filed a bar complaint, circulated on a website with a URL in Greenfield's name that was created on Oct. 4, 2023, the day after Engoron first issued the gag order against Trump. The user's feed is also rife with attacks of the judge.

When Kise disclosed the origin of the claims on the pro-Trump website, audible groans resounded in the courtroom.

At that point, Engoron seemed to have reached his wits end, calling Kise's claim that he had been made aware of the story on Friday morning, "absolutely untrue, okay?!”

“I would have remembered receiving such an allegation,” he roared, adding. “Let everybody in the room decide what they think of Breitbart… It's a shame things have descended to this level.”

Note the two instances where the judge lost emotional control. Pounding on the bench in anger and yelling ("roaring") at Kise. Trump will file for a mistrial and cite both of those incidents as evidence of bias and a basis to get the lawsuit thrown out and dismissed with prejudice. Dismissed with prejudice means that the lawsuit can never be refiled and Trump walks away unscathed from his years of fraud.

If Engoron's emotional control fails, Trump could very well win this lawsuit, which he has already lost because Engoron has already found that Trump did commit lots of fraud over the years.

This is how the ARR works and how we seeing attacks on democracy and the rule of law play out. Why Kise hasn't been sanctioned and disbarred is a legit question. The answer is simple. Trump would use it as evidence of bias by Engoron. 

In my feeble defense of democracy and the rule of law, I will write to the New York state bar asking for Kise to be investigated and punished for his blatant ethics violations. Maybe that will provoke a response. At this point, all pro-democracy institutions including state bars need to be proactive against attacks right freaking now, not later. 

Chris Kise

Former Florida solicitor general

and ARR anti-democracy warrior

Today's white working-class young men who turn to racist violence are part of a long, sad American history

 Catchy title that, wouldn't you agree?

In recent years, the United States has seen a surge of white supremacist mass shootings against racial minorities. While not always the case, mass shooters tend to be young white men.

Some journalists and researchers have argued that class and ideals of white masculinity are partly to blame.

This argument is not surprising. Throughout U.S. history, white men’s anxieties over their manhood and social class help explain many violent attacks on Black people, whom the perpetrators blame for denying them their rightful privileges.

Such was the case with Dylann Roof, a then 22-year-old white supremacist who was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2015 deaths of nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In another case involving a racist mass shooting, Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who believed a slew of racist conspiracy theories he discovered online, was sentenced to life in prison after his convictions on the 2022 murders of 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

One such unfounded conspiracy that then 18-year-old Gendron frequently cited was the “great replacement theory,” the false idea that a group is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence. Such ideas reflect white supremacist beliefs, but they also reveal deep insecurities about white men’s social status in America.

The rest of the argument:

https://news.yahoo.com/todays-white-working-class-young-122245329.html

The conclusion:

There are many parallels between racial violence of the past and mass shootings of today. Understanding anxieties about class and masculinity can perhaps go a long way to addressing such concerns in a new generation of young white men.

Question: Is "understanding" the anxieties of young white folks really going to make a difference? Or do we need to address their anxieties if we are going to conquer racism?