Major newspapers may be leading media shift on Trump coverage
For far too long, we’ve bemoaned the national media for covering Donald Trump as if he were a conventional candidate and not who he actually is: a fascist threat to our nation’s democracy. Much of the media’s trepidation stems from its fear of invoking right-wing fury at coverage deemed “unfair.” This wariness leads to the frequent “both sides do it”-style coverage that is now a cliche.
But finally, two of the most influential national media outlets
—The New York Times and The Washington Post—appear to be pivoting. If they can maintain this level of Trump scrutiny, it could spread through the broader media ecosystem, giving us hope that these outlets won’t abet Trump’s rise—again. At the very least, they can give their audiences a clear look at the nihilistic, bleak, dystopian future that Trump proudly promises his acolytes.
The so-called “party of Ronald Reagan” is now doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding and Republicans continue to show unprecedented national and global security weakness.
On Monday, Rep. James Comer pretended to have explosive evidence
of President Joe Biden’s purported criminal enterprise. He didn’t, of course. But on Tuesday, Newsmax rallied behind Comer’s dud
by interviewing the aging former “underboss” of the Gambino organized crime family, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
Yes, that last sentence is 100% factual. So what did the 78-year-old Bull, who is best known for turning state’s evidence and confessing to his involvement in 19 murders
, have to say?
“And when you say [Biden is] not part of the Mafia or organized crime, I don’t know—it’s more organized, you couldn’t get, if this is an organized crime. And like I said in previous interviews, we were like choirboys compared to what they’re doing now. So if you say it’s not organized crime, I don’t agree with that. There’s no parallel. They’re doing 10 times more. Listen, I never sold out the country. We may have raised prices in different markets and we got a piece of it, but we never turned around and sold out the whole country.”
Both anchors replied that he’d made a “fair point.”
In Newsmax’s defense, their reliance on a notorious scumbag as an expert came just a few days after Fox News had the very same scumbag on to talk with Jesse Watters about the Biden family
.
The Republican investigation into Biden and his family’s finances has reached a new low, and conservative media is following it down the drain.
Eligible voters are being purged off of national voter registries by MAGA-inspired “conservative activists.
” These so-called activists are targeting young voters, people of color, and homeless voters by filing hundreds of claims challenging individual registrations.
In their attempts to level the playing field in the upcoming 2024 elections, CBS reports, conservatives like Gail Lee, who has filed around 500 challenges on her own, claim they are fighting against the potential for voter fraud. But as CBS found, the people being challenged by people like Lee include barbershop manager James McWhorter of DeKalb County, Georgia.
Lee saw that McWhorter’s registration included a commercial address (the barbershop), and filed her challenge. “I didn’t know Gail Lee from a can of paint,” McWhorter told CBS. But luckily he received notice of the challenge and could defend himself. It turns out that the Gulf War veteran had registered to vote at a point in his life when he was unhoused. “My friends, my family never knew I was displaced, never knew I was homeless.” McWhorter would sleep in a barbershop chair after work.
ProPublica recently reported
on this anti-democratic phenomenon with a piece detailing almost 100,000 challenges in Georgia since the 2020 election, which were filed by only six conservative activists. The key is that after the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican-controlled state Legislature passed SB 202
, which, along with other racist
and inhumane attempts at voter suppression, allowed citizens to file unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.
The Stacey Abrams-founded organization Fair Fight logged
at least 92,000 voter registration challenges in 2022 in 15 of Georgia’s 159 counties, including seven of the 10 most populous counties:
Fair Fight’s data also suggests that voters of color and younger Georgians may be disproportionately affected by mass challenges. In Cobb County, the group was able to examine voter registration data — which includes a voter’s race, ethnicity and age — for most of the challenges, and found that both demographic groups were overrepresented in the challenges.
Lee told CBS News that she became motivated to act after her preferred candidate, Donald Trump, lost what she believes was a rigged election in 2020. Shortly after the election, Lee says she attended a Conservative Partnership Institute conference in Atlanta, which Republican strategist and Big Lie collaborator Cleta Mitchell
attended. Inspired, Lee began volunteering to painstakingly go through voter rolls and try to prove election fraud.
Lee seems to believe that being a Christian conservative means it’s okay to baselessly harass American citizens she doesn’t agree with.
“I believe it’s what God wants me to do. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls.” I guess this is one of those mysterious ways in which God works.
Of course McWhorter sees things differently. He told CBS, “It was hurtful that she would do something like that. You’re trying to put your foot on someone else’s neck.”
There has been a ton of coverage in recent weeks over a streak of poor 2024 polling for Democrats and Target Smart’s Tom Bonier joins us to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. We talk about what to take from these polls and how to balance them against the much more positive election results we’ve seen this year. We also discuss how early voting data continues to evolve and how Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign will use Ohio’s recent abortion and marijuana referendums to find new persuadable voters next year.
Mark your calendars for Dec. 13, folks. The House Republican campaign arm is throwing a festive bash for prolific fundraiser
, ousted speaker, and still-sitting member of Congress Kevin McCarthy.
For what, you ask. Good question.
“Is this a going-away party?” one unnamed House Republican posited to Politico
, which obtained the invitation to the private three-hour reception at an undisclosed location.
The invitation hails McCarthy’s “tireless work in support” of “delivering our House majority.” And McCarthy’s colleagues apparently plan to toast the man who has “done so much for each one of us.”
He’s done so much, in fact, they dragged him through 15 rounds of voting to secure the speakership, then kicked him out within the year! Sure, McCarthy raised a boatload of cash to help elect Republicans’ narrow majority, but you know what they say: No good deed goes unpunished.
The entire event is a strange proposition. Some people wonder if McCarthy is resigning before the end of his term, which would seriously jam the GOP majority. With last week’s ejection of Rep. George Santos
and the upcoming resignation
of Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio, House Republicans are facing a stretch next year of navigating a meager two-seat majority.
Or perhaps McCarthy plans to announce he won’t seek reelection next year, adding to the list of roughly a dozen Republicans
who are either heading to greener pastures or running for a different office.
Should McCarthy decide to leave, he would be in good company. Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who reluctantly became speaker pro tempore following McCarthy’s ouster, announced Tuesday he would not seek reelection. Let’s face it: McHenry was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he’s making damn sure that will never happen again.
MCHENRY makes it official, says in stmt: “I will be retiring from Congress at the end of my current term. This is not a decision I come to lightly, but I believe there is a season for everything and—for me—this season has come to an end.” https://t.co/xBfwvrMWGh
Whatever the case, the National Republican Campaign Committee and its chair, event host Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, clearly want to stay in McCarthy’s good graces.
Here’s looking at you, McCarthy, and your fantastically short-lived but historic turn as speaker!
There has been a ton of coverage in recent weeks over a streak of poor 2024 polling for Democrats and Target Smart’s Tom Bonier joins us to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. We talk about what to take from these polls and how to balance them against the much more positive election results we’ve seen this year. We also discuss how early voting data continues to evolve and how Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign will use Ohio’s recent abortion and marijuana referendums to find new persuadable voters next year.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene piped up with more Republican thoughts Monday, and if you know anything about Greene, you already know it’s going to be bad.
This time, the notorious Georgia representative is upset because the American economy is doing so well this year that we’ve been hitting theoretical full employment
. Unemployment is currently at about 4%, the number guessed at
by many economists as the lowest rate the nation could ever reasonably see (outside of wartime) when you account for the vagaries of retirements, job hunting, hiring, and layoffs.
Leave it to Marge to take it in a wild and wacky direction. Her Monday tweet
:
There are major staffing shortages reported in every sector from big companies to small businesses to police departments to air traffic control.
We have a population loss that is starting to show severe effects because over 63 million people have been murdered in the womb.
Oh. Yikes.
All right. So the theory here is that there are not enough corporate drones or police officers or air traffic controllers, and the reason is not because after decades of making those jobs extremely unappealing, workers are preferring less miserable workplaces. The fault lies with American women.
American women are not pumping out babies at a high enough rate to ensure that employers have a steady stream of desperate-enough workers, which is ruining America because corporatism relies on a pool of laborers who can be made desperate enough to take any job. Consumerism relies on a steadily growing population of suckers you can sell widgets to so that you never reach full widget saturation. If American women aren’t doing their part by yeeting babies into the workforce at a rapid clip, then the Glorious American Fatherland is going to fall apart. Or something.
So what about all the times in the recent past when labor markets have not been good, when businesses had their pick of workers and didn’t need the whole American supply, causing unemployment rates to soar? Shut up, that’s what. Marge is on a bit and you’re not allowed to sully it with your stupid knowledge of the past.
It would be wonderful to think Greene was just making things up in her own brain-region, but no. This is a thing. The premise that women exist in America primarily to be livestock, birthing and nurturing a steady supply of future workers to be tossed into our economic grinders and be spit back out as corporate profit reports, appears to be growing again after years of being beaten back.
It was The Washington Post editorial board
that published that astonishingly incel-premised
chastisement of women who find MAGA-spouting American men revolting and unworthy of dating, much less creating kids with. Rather than suggesting that violence-admiring conservative misogynists stop being contemptible dirtbags, the Post instead suggested that American women needed to take one for the team
, marrying these dirtbags despite the likelihood of a lifetime of misery because look, somebody’s got to get married and start pumping out babies.
How the hell will we maintain the American fiction of happy families surrounded by white picket fences if nobody wants to play their roles? Conservative men certainly can’t be expected to change their behavior, and that means nonconservative women are going to have to change theirs if we don’t want society to collapse.
But Greene’s version is a blend of the Post’s vision, which blames the nation’s women for making choices that keep contradicting what conservatism’s radical far-right wants to force upon them via theocratic law, and the conservative technocrat version espoused by people like Elon Musk.
Musk has been a big proponent of boosting the world population, but his version is premised more squarely on saving consumerism. If women have fewer children, that means markets will shrink because there’s less people to sell shit to. For the Musks of the world, this is literally a crisis. Screw the environment, sustainability, and the idea of having even a square meter of land somewhere that isn’t either a Starbucks or a parking lot for a Starbucks: If corporate profit reports don’t grow every quarter from now until the sun burns out, people like Musk will shrivel up and die.
“If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words,” Musk has said
. This remains an extraordinarily odd position, given that mankind has at all points in history had a lower population than it currently does and, despite worse medicine and less resilient communities, did just fine for itself. Musk’s premise is in fact that even returning to the population levels we had when the first Star Wars film came out will cause a collapse. This is weird—except as pean to consumerist market growth, which it assuredly is.
Whatever the argument, the far right seems to be in agreement that whatever’s wrong with America at any given moment in time can be fixed if America’s women shut up, marry conservative men, and start popping out babies at a rapid clip. This has been a shared fixation of other modern-era authoritarian regimes: Nazi Germany
, Italian fascists under Benito Mussolini
, and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin
all conferred state-issued medals on women who birthed at least four but preferably eight or more children.
Make of that what you will. At the very least, chastising women to have more children regardless of their ability to care for them appears to coincide with a belief that women are tools of the state, not full-fledged citizens with the right to live their lives as they choose. But while past authoritarian regimes at least handed out medals and prizes to the women who complied, it’s difficult to imagine the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene or admirers of Elon Musk being willing to pay for American mothers to receive so much as a single box of diapers.
There has been a ton of coverage in recent weeks over a streak of poor 2024 polling for Democrats and Target Smart’s Tom Bonier joins us to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. We talk about what to take from these polls and how to balance them against the much more positive election results we’ve seen this year. We also discuss how early voting data continues to evolve and how Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign will use Ohio’s recent abortion and marijuana referendums to find new persuadable voters next year.
