Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough raised eyebrows in the studio by cursing out influencers in the social media “gutter” who are incentivized to lie to readers at “no cost” in a passionate defense of journalism at traditional media outlets.
The MSNBC team welcomed Axios Jim VandeHei into the studio Monday morning to congratulate him on receiving the Fourth Estate award alongside his publication’s co-founder Mike Allen. The focus, however, quickly rounded on a speech he delivered to the National Press Club
, which praised fearless and impartial journalism and the importance of a free press while slamming opinionated influencers who are “popping off on Twitter.”
Energized by a clip playing back VandeHei’s remarks, Scarborough led the Morning Joe team
in applause before unleashing himself on social media.
Scarborough began: “First of all, I got to say, extraordinary content. It needed to be said. It continues to need to be said when all of the garbage that is flying around on social media, lying about reporters, lying about the hard work they do, lying about the hard work editors, lying about everything up and down about not only their alternative set of facts, but alternative set of facts about what people like you do.”
The host added, “Even if we had to bleep you more than we would if we ran a Dave Chappelle concert, it was still good.”
Before VandeHei could speak, Scarborough opened up in a tirade of his own, slamming “critics of the press” for “feeling more empowered than ever to lie.”
Scarborough relayed how his friends would get their news online from outlets like the Epic Times, retelling how he mocked them for reading “a website run by conspiracy theorists in a Chinese religious cult.”
“That’s where you get!” he continued. “Social media people lying every day, every hour, every minute about the news. What you do matters. What reporters do matters. What The New York Times does matters. What the Wall Street Journal does matters. What Jonathan Lemire does matters. What The Financial Times does matters. What MSNBC news and MSNBC reporters do matters. It matters.”
Between offerings from his guest, Scarborough didn’t stop, growing more excited with each interruption.
“These places that have great reporters, right?” he continued. “They don’t need to worry about what happens over the next five minutes or the next five weeks, the next five months because you print the truth all the time.”
He added: “This is what gets me, somebody pops off on Twitter or some other social and they lie. They make mistakes. You know what the cost of that is? Nothing. They do it again. In fact, it helps them because algorithms are rigged, so you stir up shit.”
Visibly shocked at Scarborough’s swearing, co-host Mika Brzezinski glanced off camera but her husband didn’t stop”: “The more you can get people angry, the more followers you get, but also now it is monetized to help you.”
Complaining about the lack of accountability online for sharing false or wrong information, noting that in established outlets “editor after editor after editor after editor” check stories to make sure information is “double and triple-sourced.”
He continued: “And still, sometimes they get it wrong. And so then what happens? They either retract it or, most likely, they get sued if they don’t retract it, right? So, there are checks and balances there that you don’t find in the gutter when you’re on social media just following algorithms that lead you to liars.”
Closing out, have taken up most of the airtime from the segment, Scarborough slammed people who claim they “don’t trust the press anymore” and who have “been listening to Donald Trump undermine the press and Elon Musk and everybody else.”
To the contrary, he argued, the established press represents a range of ideological stances, citing the Wall Street Journal as an example.
He concluded: “If people think that Rupert Murdoch’sWall Street Journal is a left-wing pro-deep state newspaper, they’re beyond help. At some point, people have to want to know the truth. If they don’t want to know the truth, well, then go ahead and walk around ignorant.”
Judge will address abuse evidence in 1989 murder convictions, with immediate freedom as one possible result
A judge will decide Monday whether new evidence warrants a re-examination of the convictions of Erik and Lyle Menendez
in the murders of their parents in their Beverly Hills home more than 30 years ago.
The brothers were found guilty of murdering Jose and Kitty Menendez in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. While their defense attorneys argued at trial that they had been sexually abused by their father, prosecutors denied that and accused them of killing their parents for money. In the years that followed, they repeatedly appealed their convictions without success.
Casualties include 14 people who have been sent to hospitalJon Henley is the Guardian’s Europe correspondentAn ultranationalist, Moscow-friendly Nato critic is set to face a
On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were no exceptions at that grisly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. I contemplated making the trip from Maryland to New Jersey to see whether I, as a doctor, could garner special treatment until I realized that state and employer travel rules would mean waiting for a COVID test result and possibly facing quarantine on my return. In the end, my father spent his time in the hospital alone, suffering the double harm of illness and isolation.
These events still frustrate me years later; I have a hard time believing that restrictions on hospital visitation and interstate travel helped more people than they hurt. Many Americans remain angry about the pandemic for other reasons too: angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health-care system as secretary of Health and Human Services. The Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary has been tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration. And the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected
to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men have each advocated
for changes
to the systems and structures of public health. But what unites them all—and what legitimizes them in the eyes of this next administration—is a lasting rage over COVID.
To understand this group’s ascent to power and what it could mean for America, one must consider their perception of the past five years. The world, as Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their compatriots variously understand it, is dreadful: SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab in Wuhan, China; U.S. officials tried to cover up
that fact; and the government responded to the virus by ignoring scientific evidence, violating citizens’ civil rights, and suppressing dissent. In the face of this modern “dark age
,” as Bhattacharya has called it, only a few brave dissidents were willing to flip on the light.
Makary, Trump’s pick for FDA, presents as being in the truth-to-power mold. A surgeon, policy researcher, and—full disclosure—my academic colleague, he gained a loyal following during the pandemic as a public-health critic. Through media outlets such as Fox News and TheWall Street Journal, Makary advocated for a more reserved use of COVID vaccines: He suggested that adults who had recovered
from a COVID infection, as well as children
more generally, could forgo some doses; he is also skeptical of booster shots
for everyone and vaccine mandates
. Makary, too, thinks that public-health officials have been lying to the American people: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” he told Congress
last year, referring to public-health guidance that emphasized transmission of COVID on surfaces, downplayed natural immunity, encouraged boosters in young people, and promoted the efficacy of masking.
Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist, rose to fame in October 2020 as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration
, which advocated for a “focused protection” approach to the pandemic. The idea was to isolate vulnerable seniors while allowing low-risk individuals to return to their normal lives. Much of the public-health community aggressively criticized
this strategy at the time, and—as would later be revealed—NIH Director Francis Collins privately called
for a “quick and devastating” takedown of its premise. Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist
” that reduced the reach of his posts, according to internal documents
released to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2022. Among conservatives and lockdown skeptics, Bhattacharya has come to be seen as a fearless truth teller
who was silenced by the federal government and Big Tech. (In reality, and despite his frequent umbrage
, Bhattacharya was not ignored. He met with the Trump administration and was in communication with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
.)
In response to their marginalization from polite scientific society—and long before they were in line for key government positions—Makary and Bhattacharya have each sought out a public reckoning. They bothcalled
for the medical establishment to issue an apology to the American people. Makary demanded “fresh leadership
” at an FDA that had made serious blunders on COVID medications and vaccines, and Bhattacharya asked for the formation of a COVID commission
as a necessary first step in “restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts.” They even worked together at the Norfolk Group
, a cohort of like-minded scientists and doctors that laid out what they deemed to be the most vital questions that must be asked of the nation’s public-health leaders. The gist of some of these
is: Why didn’t they listen to “focused protection” supporters such as Bhattacharya and Makary? The report wonders, for instance, why Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, avoided meeting
with a cadre of anti-lockdown advocates that included Bhattacharya in the summer of 2020. (“They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” Birx wrote in an email to the vice president’s chief of staff at the time.)
This sense of outrage over COVID will be standard in the next administration. Trump’s pick for surgeon general
, the doctor and Fox News personality Janette Nesheiwat, has called the prolonged isolation brought about by shutdowns “cruel and inhumane,” and said that the collateral damage caused by the government’s actions was “worse than the pandemic
” for most Americans. His nominee for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, pushed for herd immunity
in May 2020 and encouraged anti-lockdown protests
.
Bhattacharya, at least, has denied having any interest in revenge. Last year he helped write an op-ed that cautioned against initiating a “Nuremberg 2.0
” and instead presented scientists like himself and Makary as “apostles of evidence-based science” who are simply “calling for restoring evidence-based medicine to a pride of place in public health.”
Taken on its own, I’m sympathetic to that goal. I consider myself a fellow member of the “evidence-based medicine” movement that values high-quality data over blind loyalty to authority. I’m also of a similar mind
as Makary about the FDA’s long-standing dysfunction. The COVID skeptics are correct that, in some domains, the pandemic produced too little knowledge and too much bluster
. We still don’t know how well various social-distancing measures worked, what the best vaccination policy might be, or what the true origins of the virus were. I remember following the debates about these issues on Twitter, which functioned as a town square for doctors, scientists, and public-health leaders during the pandemic years. Mainstream experts tended to defend unproved public-health measures with self-righteousness and absolutism: You were either in favor of saving lives or you were one of the skeptics who was trying to kill Grandma. Nuanced conversations were rare. Accusations of “misinformation
” were plentiful.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was indeed spreading misinformation with a fire hose. (For example, he has falsely said that the COVID shots are the “deadliest vaccine ever made
.”) Bhattacharya and Makary have been far more grounded in reality, but they did make their own share of mistakes during the pandemic—and they haven’t spent much time rehashing them. So allow me to reflect on their behalf: In March 2020, Bhattacharya argued
that COVID’s mortality rate was likely to be much lower than anyone was saying at the time, even to the point of being one-tenth that of the flu. “If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic,” he wrote, “then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible.” Bhattacharya continued to be wrong in important ways. A pivotal assumption of the Great Barrington Declaration was that as more healthy people got sick and then recovered, the residual risk of new infections would fall low enough that vulnerable people could safely leave isolation. This process would likely take three to six months, his group explained
. SARS-CoV-2, however, is still circulating at high levels nearly five years later. At least 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID. Had effective vaccines not arrived shortly after the 2020 declaration, senior citizens might be in hiding to this day.
As for Makary, his most infamous take involved a February 2021 prediction
that the United States would reach herd immunity within two months. “Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The Delta and Omicron waves followed, killing hundreds of thousands more Americans.
When I reached out to Bhattacharya, he said his early guess about COVID’s mortality rate was meant only to help describe a “range of possible outcomes,” and that to characterize it otherwise would be false. (Makary did not respond to my questions for this story.)
The incoming administration’s COVID skeptics have also expressed sympathy for still-unproved theories about the pandemic’s origin. If you want to become an evidence apostle, believing that SARS-CoV-2 came from an NIH-funded lab leak
seems to be part of the deal
. Kennedy wrote multiplebooks
purporting to link Anthony Fauci, in particular, to the creation of the virus. Similarly, Makary appears
in a new documentary called Thank You Dr. Fauci
, which describes “a bio-arms race with China and what could be the largest coverup in modern history.” (Fauci has denied these claims
on multiple occasions, including in Congressional testimony
. He called the idea that he participated in a cover-up of COVID’s origins “absolutely false and simply preposterous.
”)
A certain amount of sycophancy toward the more bizarre elements of the coalition is also common. Makary and Bhattacharya have both praised Kennedy in extravagant terms despite his repeated falsehoods: “He wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. A hundred percent of it was true,” Makary said
of a volume that devotes multiple chapters to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya called
Kennedy a “disruptor” whose views on vaccines and AIDS are merely “eccentric.” (Bhattacharya has also suggested
that the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Malone
would be an “amazing leader” for the country’s health agencies.)
Anger about the government’s response to the pandemic swept the COVID contrarians into power. Resentment was their entrée into Washington. Now they’ll have a chance to fix some genuine, systemic problems with the nation’s public-health establishment. They’ll also have the ability to settle scores.
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Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.
More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.
What did I get wrong?
My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.
Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster
than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed
. When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent
, higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated
their local economy much more favorably.
None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …
Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed
an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third
of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular
than Trump.
Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …
Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect
Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent
to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast
an anti-Trump vote for president.
If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:
Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.
The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs.Foreigners will pay for the tariffs.The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.
In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.
Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.
Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.
When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.
Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.
He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.
He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.
He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.
He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.
For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.
American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.
Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.
Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned
, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”
The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that Providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel
about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.
Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.
“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed
in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”
So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.
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Dear Therapist,
My husband and I have been together for five years. In that time, his parents have separated and are now divorcing. My husband and his two sisters are not particularly close with either parent because of their less-than-ideal childhood.
As adults, my husband and his siblings have established their own holiday traditions. My husband spends most holiday time with my family, and his siblings spend theirs with their in-laws. Before the divorce, my brother and his siblings would all get together with their parents for a simple dinner or gift exchange every year (for both Thanksgiving and Christmas), but now there’s no plan to bring the different parts of the family together.
In recent weeks, both parents, who each live by themselves, have started hinting at not wanting to be alone during the holidays and hoping to potentially join our plans. Neither parent seems willing to host—they just want the invitation. My sisters-in-law have made it clear that they won’t be inviting their parents to their plans with their own in-laws. This leaves my husband feeling like the onus is on us to “take care” of his parents by including them in our plans, which are really my family’s plans.
What’s the right move here? Ask my family to include them knowing that it shakes up our dynamic, or figure out how to navigate his parents truly being alone for the holidays?
Dear Reader,
I empathize with the fantasy that there’s an objective “right move” in this situation, but the reality is that different choices will have different consequences, none more “right” than the others. The best you can do is reflect on the options and, with the clarity that comes from reflection, choose the one that feels best for now.
I say “for now” because whatever you do this year isn’t what you have to do forever. Your extended family is going through a significant transition, and at this time next year, and in the years to come, the dynamics will shift and settle. Eventually, your husband’s parents might be fine attending a gathering together, or one or both might find a new partner and have other places to go. Holiday plans that make sense this year might look completely different in the future.
That should take some pressure off, because if whatever you do this year doesn’t work out as well as you hope, you can view the decision as nothing more than a well-intentioned and temporary experiment.
To help you design that experiment, let’s first think about the bigger dynamics at play. The reason you and your husband feel so conflicted is that your question touches on a complex intersection of family loyalty, emotional boundaries, and holiday expectations—each of which, by itself, is weighty and fraught. Add to this some painful childhood history, and it’s easy to feel confused and pulled in different directions. Even so, your family had come up with a viable solution, and now this divorce has transformed what was once a manageable annual gathering into something even more complicated.
I want to emphasize the impact of this divorce not just on your holiday plans, but on the family as a whole. Although your husband and his siblings aren’t particularly close with their parents, I imagine that they’re still dealing with the emotions of what’s known as “gray divorce”—a divorce that occurs later in life and that creates unique challenges for adult children. Many people assume that parental divorce affects adult children less significantly than young children, but it can be just as destabilizing, in different ways. Many adult children find themselves in exactly your husband’s position—managing their parents’ emotional needs while trying to maintain their own family structures and traditions.
On a deeper level, a late-in-life divorce signals a fundamental shift in family identity—even if your husband’s parents were less than ideal, he saw himself as being part of an intact family—and he has some adjusting to do. For one, he may be experiencing role reversal, in which adult children tend to take on a quasi-parental role and feel responsible for their parents’ well-being. He may also be feeling pulled back into certain unhealthy family dynamics that he would rather avoid. Notice how the divorce has highlighted different coping strategies among the siblings. Your sisters-in-law have chosen strict boundaries in upholding their in-laws’ traditions, whereas your husband feels pulled toward accommodation. This divergence can lead to resentment reminiscent of long-standing family roles (for example, was your husband historically the “responsible” or “peacemaking” child?). And finally, he may be feeling stuck in the middle of his parents’ newly separated lives, forced to navigate competing needs and perceived obligations.
For all of these reasons, you might want to have a conversation with your husband about his emotional response to his parents’ divorce. What does it bring up for him? How does it affect his relationship with his siblings and whether he feels alone or supported as his family goes through this change? What’s driving his sense of responsibility to “take care” of his parents? Is it a genuine desire for connection, is it simply guilt, or is there also a sense of real compassion? Once you understand more about how he feels, the two of you can have a candid conversation about the three interconnected challenges you as a couple are facing: your husband’s feeling of obligation to his parents, your commitment to your own family’s traditions, and the broader question of how much responsibility adult children bear for their parents’ emotional well-being.
If you can have these conversations with grace and empathy—for each other, for yourselves, and for his parents—you’ll likely find that they not only help you understand each other better, but that the options are less binary than you presented in your letter.
For instance, you can ask his parents to join your family without “shaking up” your family dynamic by not focusing so much on whether his parents are having a good time, and just letting everyone be. You can choose not to invite his parents to your family’s holiday gatherings but also not leave them “truly alone”—by calling or doing FaceTime instead, perhaps including some real-time virtual cooking or gift-opening. Alternatively, you can still do the simple dinner and gift exchange you’ve always done with both parents by telling them that if they don’t feel comfortable being in the same room together, they can always say no—but that’s what you’re able to offer given that you have two families to consider, and three celebrations are just too many. Or you can decide that doing another simple dinner and gift exchange isn’t that burdensome (because, as you say, it’s “simple”) and invite them individually for a version of the traditional plan—or schedule even shorter, separate visits with each of them.
As you become more flexible with the possibilities, remember that the goal isn’t to solve their loneliness but to help them adapt to their new reality in a healthy way. Maybe that involves connecting them with community resources or social groups for divorced seniors, encouraging them to build their own new traditions and actively engage with their existing social connections while pursuing new ones.
All of these are valid ways to experiment with creating holiday celebrations that balance compassion for his parents with respect for your own family’s needs and joy. As you do this, keep in mind that part of “taking care” of your husband’s parents is helping them build independent lives post-divorce—and that this is one of the most caring things adult children can do.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
