Hightlights 3. Never Enough; Trump Bad for News, Good for News Moguls; THE PROBLEM WASN’T DEFUND THE POLICE; IT’S THE VOTER ERROR, STUPID; School's Out, Forever; It's Not the Policy

November 13, 2015, Beirut from Crown Plaza, 6:26am

 (NEVER) ENOUGH

 

“Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.

 

“We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.

 

“These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry. …

 

“Absolutely anything is possible, and we must acknowledge this, not out of surrender, but as a means of readying ourselves for the impossible fights ahead.”

 

SOURCE: Roxane Gay, New York Times

 

MOGULS EXCITED TO USE TRUMP TO FURTHER CONSOLIDATE MEDIA OWNERSHIP, LAY OFF WORKERS          

 

“Trump is suing CBS News, accusing 60 Minutes of editing an interview with Kamala Harris in a way that flattered the vice-president. He also said his debate with Harris, which many observers judged her to have won, had been ‘rigged’ by CBS. ‘They ought to take away their licence for the way they did that,’ he said. 

 

“While Trump has previously lost defamation lawsuits against media outlets including CNN and The New York Times, the threats are costly and time-consuming for media organisations that are already under financial pressure.

 

“The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates US radio and TV, said in October that it ‘does not revoke licences for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage’ . . . .  

 

“Trump has announced plans to ‘shatter the leftwing censorship regime,’ blaming ‘depraved corporate news media’ for ‘conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people.’ …

 

“But Trump has pledged to bring the FCC, an independent regulatory agency, ‘back under presidential authority, as the constitution demands’— a misreading of the law, according to media scholars. ‘What he wants is to weaponise the FCC,’ Kaplan said.  . . . 

Yet despite the concerns over what the incoming administration might mean for journalism and few hopes of the same sort of ‘Trump bump’ in audiences that was seen during his last administration, there is a sense of cautious optimism that dealmaking can return to the sector.

 

David Zaslav, chief executive of CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery, told analysts last week that Trump’s return would offer ‘an opportunity for consolidation.’

 

His comments landed with a thud with journalists at CNN, who are bracing for job losses and 

cost cuts in the coming months. But on Wall Street, Warner’s struggling stock price has risen 8.6 per cent.

 

“’It is reasonable to assume a pro-consolidation regulatory climate,’ wrote Rich Greenfield, analyst at LightShed Partners. ‘We would expect great urgency to pursue M&A.’”

 

SOURCE: Daniel Thomas, et al., Financial Times

 

THE PROBLEM WASN’T “DEFUND THE POLICE”

 

Doug Henwood: “Now, there's been a war on progressive prosecutors. Some of them lost, not all of them lost in the most recent round of elections. What about that?

 

“How much effect do they have? And are they a disappearing breed?”

 

Alex Vitaly: “Well, they're not a disappearing breed. We still have several and some of them are very popular and have won re-election like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. I always have felt that there are profound limits to the progressive prosecutor movement, which was largely driven by folks in the defense bar, you know, lawyers trying to remake the legal system, and thinking that that would be sufficient to dial back mass criminalization.

 

“And I think what that movement lacked was a strong basis in communities that experience high levels of crime and disorder relative to other areas, and that just pursuing a strategy of reduced incarceration doesn't address the profound insecurities that a lot of these communities experience. And this made that whole movement really vulnerable to backlash, because the infrastructure of public safety in the communities was not enhanced by this movement. With some exceptions, including Krasner, who's gone out and raised millions of dollars to put into actual communities, to make communities safer, and of course, he has enjoyed, as a result, the highest level of kind of electoral support. . . . .

 

“We always knew that one of the weaknesses of the three-word phrase ‘defund the police’ is that it only captured the kind of negative aspects of the argument, as if it were sort of a punishment of police, rather than the positive aspects of the argument, which were to take those resources that we spend on policing and put them into community-based safety strategies to create flourishing neighborhoods. We need to go back to that original concept of divest from the criminal legal system, invest in communities.

 

“When we do that and we have a chance to explain it to people, there's actually very high levels of support for that. Things like getting police out of schools and bringing in counselors and after school programs, creating community-based mental health crisis response teams instead of sending police. It turns out that hundreds of cities are actually investing in these alternatives to policing, but what they're not doing is actually dialing back policing.”

 

SOURCE: Doug Henwood and Alex Vitaly, Background Briefing November 14, 2024

 

IT’S THE VOTER ERROR, STUPID

 

SOURCE: Christopher Hale, Twitter

 

DARK PROMISE: SCHOOL'S OUT, FOREVER

 

“For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. ‘Liberal democracy,’ he says, ‘offers moral constraints without problem-solving’ — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while ‘populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.’ Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: ‘Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.’

 

“Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this ‘morally unconstrained collective egoism.’

 

“Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another. Autocrats such as Orban and Putin reject that deliberative process, claiming for themselves the exclusive right to define those obligations. If those two leaders, and Trump’s own first term, are any indication, he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn’t exist. Expect asylum officers to be high on that list.

 

“A major target outside of government will be universities. In Hungary, the Central European University, a pioneering research and educational institution (and Magyar’s academic home), was forced into exile. To understand what can happen to public universities in the United States, look at Florida, where the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively turned the state university system into a highly policed arm of his government. The MAGA movement’s attack on private universities has been underway for some time; most recently it drove the congressional hearings on antisemitism, in the wake of which half a dozen college presidents no longer have their jobs. Watch for moves to strip private universities of federal funding and tax breaks. Under this kind of financial pressure, even the largest and wealthiest universities will cut jobs and shutter departments; smaller liberal arts colleges will go out of business.”

 

SOURCE: Masha Gessen, New York Times

 

IT’S NOT THE POLICY

 

 

SOURCE: Keith Boykin, Twitter