You may ask yourself: how did we get here?

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

You wake up, working hard to greet the new day with hope, if not delight.  Then you decide to check whether anything has happened that you need to know about. Whether your chosen medium is a newspaper, the television, or your trusty phone, the first response is invariably the same: fear and loathing, although possibly not in that order.

It's as if you entered a strange new world, a one that neither you nor Howard the Duck ever made.  In some ways it feels the same: the New York Times still prints its six-column front page, the social media feed scrolls endlessly, and Heather with the Weather is still yucking it up with Pam on the Jam Cam.

But something is terribly wrong.  The stories are horrifying and shocking.  And yet it is presented to us as if it's just another day in the belching smokestacks of the news business.

The United States, once considered a model of stability and democracy, has degenerated into a dysfunctional tyranny whose every act threatens the lives and health of billions around the world.  And yet all of this chaos and destruction is presented to us as if there's nothing to see here, people, move along.

Even worse, the same people who are presenting the intolerable as ordinary have started to remark on the phenomenon.

Here's a recent thumbsucker from one of the chief culprits, The New York Times: 

Mr. Trump accused Mr. Obama of “treason,” and posted a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and imprisoned. He followed that Saturday with a fake image of Mr. Obama in the role of O.J. Simpson driving a white Bronco being chased by police cars, including one driven by Mr. Trump. A president posting such images of another president would once have been seen as shocking, but with Mr. Trump it has become business as usual. 

That's Peter Baker scrivening away in his hot dog suit.  How'd that happen, Peter, you may ask him or at least yourself.

In fact the current occupant of the White House has been doing and saying batsh*t crazy cruel bigoted insane crap since he launched his first campaign by announcing that Mexicans were sending us their assassins and rapists, who have been demonstrating just how vicious and evil they are by abandoning their life of crime and instead picking American crops in the broiling sun, toiling in restaurant kitchens, and hammering nails on American construction sites. 

Recently, a website staffed by apostate Republican hacks, The Bulwark, noticed the vileness of White House communications:

ONCE UPON A TIME, THE PEOPLE TASKED with speaking for the president of the United States were not just excellent communicators but also known for their good sense, composure, diplomacy, truthfulness (for the most part, at least), and tact. Think of the late Bill Moyers, who served as press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson....

Now, as with so much else, those norms have been shattered. President Donald Trump’s top-ranking communicators....are known for their rashness, haughtiness, vulgarity, mendacity, and pique. They radiate contempt for members of the media who dare to ask tough questions, even obvious ones, and demand subservience in return. Instead of offering perspective, they promote misunderstanding. Instead of encouraging discourse, they deploy invective to shut it down. 

The Bulwark chose a few receipts from the bulging file:

[Karoline Leavitt]...the nation’s youngest-ever White House press secretary (age 27).... referr[ed] to Joe Biden as having been “a brain-dead president.”

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung

One example of the level of competence Leavitt has brought to the job was presented in March when she attacked a federal judge who ordered a pause to mass deportations under the clearly inapplicable Alien Enemies Act. Leavitt, at a press briefing, railed against Judge James Boasberg, who she said was “a Democrat activist” appointed to the bench by Barack Obama.

As one of the reporters in the room, Garrett Haake of NBC News, felt obliged to point out, Boasberg was actually appointed by President George W. Bush.... 

And she's the most civil of the entire Pol Potbelly pledge class.  Here's her boss, former pro wresting carnival barker Steven Cheung:

In April, Trump’s director of communications blasted the Daily Beast’s chief content officer, Joanna Coles, for making an inquiry regarding the 79-year-old president’s apparent weight loss. Cheung, in a post on X, called her “a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”  

....Cheung followed that in May, when he launched an unhinged attack on HuffPost reporter S.V. Date, who had the audacity to ask why most of Trump’s public remarks are not made available on the White House website. “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” Cheung declared. “The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms.” In a case of look-who’s-talking irony overload, Cheung went on to urge Date to “Stop beclowning yourself.” 

But other than The Bulwark, the daily White House outpouring of scurrilous and potty-mouthed insult comedy passes without media comment.  Which means that it becomes the vile new normal, like official White House memes featuring photos of alligators ready to devour helpless civil immigration detainees.

And that's not all the media has normalized with its silence.  We've already discussed at great length its near-unanimous refusal to cover the proliferating examples of Pol Potbelly's raging dementia.

There's also the normalization of the massive flagrant corruption of Pol Potbelly trousering as much as $7 billion on various crypto schemes while blocking all legislative efforts to bring these hot air merchants under effective regulation.  (Hint: since crypto gains are based on the efforts of others and crypto has no intrinsic value (unlike commodities), crypto “coins” are obviously securities and can easily be regulated as such).

Sure there are (good) stories detailing individual get Trump rich quick crypto schemes, but the next day the corruption is accepted as normal.  Just last weekend, he spent millions of taxpayer dollars to promote his pisspoor Scottish golf clubs by showing how much fun it is to cheat at golf.  Nobody in the media said a discouraging word.

Even more fundamentally, the fact that the current President tried to incite an insurrection against the United States Government and then pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists, many of them convicted of violent attacks on police, seems to be unworthy of media recollection.  This not-ancient history would seems to be highly useful background any time that Pol Potbelly attempts to further subvert the rule of law by for example siccing his Justice Department on both his political opponents, including former Presidents, and sitting federal judges. 

1,000,000 years ago in America

Nor has Pol Potbelly's sadistic and blatantly illegal assault of immigrants, including those in the process of obtaining legal relief that would allow them to remain in the United States, occasioned any sustained media coverage, although there were stories outlining the legal jousting around for example the law-free effort to use the Alien and Sedition Acts to asport immigrants to a foreign concentration camp for indefinite torture.

They have now been sprung, a fact that has been reported for one day, but the grotesque tortures they endured because of the Pol Potbelly regime's criminal conspiracy seem to have generated almost no media attention.  The coverage has mostly been limited to enterprising web sites like ProPublica, which reported:

The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.” 

Are we suppose to regard this as the new normal for U.S. immigration policy? The lack of wide media attention to these appalling true stories suggests that the answer is yes.

Apologists for the media can make several points in their defense.  One of the worst is the media's frequent refusal to cover scoops broken by others, like ProPublica's vivid accounts of the torture of Kristi Noem's Salvadoran kidnap victims.  

The second point is more fundamental and plausible: the news is by definition what happened today.  What happened seven months ago, like Pol Potbelly's mass pardon of violent insurrectionists, isn't news.

There's something to that, but we know how the media can by constant repetition and echoing reaction coverage keep a minor story front and center for months on end. 

Exhibit A:

 Remember what happened next? Ask CNN:

Funny how that works.

A similar pattern is playing out today, with massive daily idiotic coverage of Democratic New York Mayoral Nominee Zohran Mamdani.  Did you know he says that a phrase that offends many Jews has a number of meanings and uses, not all of them antisemitic? If you did, why do you care?  Rest assured The New York Times cares a lot more about that than it does about the ongoing subversion of the United States Government by its current President and his enablers.

This lack of context reduces the daily outrage (the Director of National Intelligence makes fraudulent accusations of criminal conduct against President Obama?) to just another one-day sickening jolt.  We consume these unconnected tidbits thinking this is not our beautiful government, but our media send the message that it's just water rushing underground.  

But, by letting the days go by, our media is ensuring that the once-in-a-lifetime demolition of institutions and norms becomes the new reality.  What sickens alarmed citizens on the Upper West Side becomes the normal background noise at the apocryphal Ohio diner.

An entire generation is coming of age believing that it's OK for a President to grab women by their p**ssies, pervert government into a machine to line his own pockets, subvert the Constitution he is obligated to preserve and protect, and persecute political opponents with both legal attacks and the vilest invective.

To which we say: fuck that. 

Broken News: CBS going the way of America's newspapers

 

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Financial Editor Samuel Insull

Forty years ago, most American cities were lucky to wake up to a mighty daily newspaper.  In most places it had a monopoly.  The paper landed on your doorstep with a satisfying thunk, thick with classified ads, including help-wanted, and big display ads from department and specialty stores.

The money was so good that publishers used a slice of their haul to build newsrooms, which often produced high-quality journalism that covered their cities, their states, and often their country and the wider world. 

Readers of papers like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, Long Island Newsday, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Constitution enjoyed the bounty of news and information.  These papers, in addition to publishing their own work, aggregated content from other first rate news outlets, with the result that even mid-sized papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Providence Journal could provide wide-ranging coverage for 50 cents a day, and maybe $2.50 on Sundays.

The glory days of print journalism

Now they're all lifeless husks, mostly owned by a rapacious private equity juggernaut called Alden. Over the decades, they've been sold, bought, resold, leveraged, and stripped of their assets.   In other words, the life has been sucked out of them for the profit of a few relentless raiders.  In many cities, they have ceased publishing paper editions.  As a result, at a lot of big airports (like Austin), when you go to the airport and try to buy a paper, you get nothing but a blank stare and a $7 bag of M&M's.

The results have been devastating.  Most of America lives in a newspaper desert.   Only a few papers make even a pretense of covering the news, either because they are owned by nonprofit institutions, like the Tampa Bay Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer, or by the rare tycoon willing to leave well enough alone, like The Boston Globe.

One newspaper has the power and financial clout to stand above the political pressure, but sadly has chosen to bend to and parrot reactionary disinformation for reasons best known to its owner, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI. 

The story of how predatory private capital destroyed America's great newspapers has been well told elsewhere, including in The Atlantic back in 2021.  It's not that complicated:

And guess what?  Four years later, the vultures are still picking at the carcass of the once-mighty Tribune:

The deadline for Chicago Tribune newsroom journalists to apply for a buyout has come and gone....According to the union, no one applied....

The big picture: Tribune owner Alden Capital had offered buyouts, hoping newsroom union workers would take them to avoid layoffs.

It's unclear how much money Alden is trying to save with this move.

Eventually, the paper will shrivel up and die, leaving another huge void in news coverage. 

With newspapers variously in decline or extinct, the private equity vultures are circling around looking for new prey, similarly wounded by technological change.

It looks like they're landing on legacy (non-streaming) media like broadcast and cable news, which have also suffered from America's insane habit of getting its news through bent social media outlets like X, Facebook, or TikTok.  The advertising dollars follow the eyeballs, aided by the tracking software that prackages social media users neatly by stealing their data and using it to target advertising.

A few ominous examples.  Let's start with the latest outrageous attack on free speech:

CBS has been leaking to favored sources like CNN that the decision was purely financial and not a human sacrifice to Pol Potbelly to grease the wheels for government approval of the sale of the CBS properties to Skydance, an entity controlled by the feckless failson of an insanely rich reactionary mogul, Larry Ellison.

Was Colbert's late night show, number one in late night, really such a money drain?  CBS's parent, Paramount Global, files a legally required SEC disclosure document that's supposed to list all material risks to its businesses on Form 10-K.   There is clear economic decline in the legacy cable businesses, like Nickelodeon.  We didn't find much related to the supposed collapse of advertising revenue in late night or elsewhere in the broadcast day.

Here's one risk factor that we guess didn't turn out to be as risky as Paramount told the world:

We face substantial and increasing competition to attract creative talent, to produce and acquire the rights to high-quality content, to acquire, engage and retain audiences and users, and to distribute our content and services on a variety of third-party platforms. Competition for talent, content, audiences, subscribers, service providers, advertising, production infrastructure and distribution is intense.... 

If Paramount can feel free to cut loose the most talented man in unscripted television, then maybe the competition isn't as bad as it claimed?  Or maybe Paramount threw Colbert overboard to induce the current tyrannical US Government to approve the sale to Skydance?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding answers:

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, questioned if Colbert’s show was canceled due to his criticism of President Donald Trump.

[image or embed]

— Forbes (@forbes.com) July 18, 2025 at 6:40 AM

We'll let you know when Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount thanks to her now-dead daddy, gets back to her.  When it happens, watch out for the flying swine.

But there's good reason to fear whether broadcast and cable media, especially news, are headed to the same fate as America's newspapers.  Like newspapers, they are pressured by changes in consumer preferences and technology, but still generate a fair amount of cash.

That means they're bait for private equity vultures ready to steal the cash, fire the staff, and run the operations into the ground.

Assuming that throwing Colbert into the volcano appeases Pol Potbelly and the sale to Skydance is approved, the Ellison family will own a grab-bag of assets that can be sold off at leisure, including CBS's 24 local broadcast stations (still pretty profitable from car dealers insanely telling you that the best way to enjoy your summer is to sit and be swindled in their clammy dealerships), the CBS broadcast network, or CBS News.

The plight of CNN is equally dire.  CNN is owned along with lots of other cable, streaming, and studio assets by a money-losing behemoth called Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). CNN has already been shunted from the former Time Warner to AT&T to its current masters.   

The parent has already shuffled CNN and other cable assets into a new subsidiary separate from the studio and streaming services, the better to sell it off to private equity. WBD reports as a risk factor the decline in what they call “linear programming” which includes CNN,  Another risk factor is WBD's whopping debt.  The classic solution to burdensome debt is to sell assets to raise cash.  Why wouldn't WBD sell CNN and other cable assets to a private equity finagler?  Alden is tanned, rested, and ready.

Good night and good luck to democracy

The economics of cable new channels are deteriorating, and all of them, including CNN, are searching for a new sustainable revenue model.  So far they haven't found one. 

It's already happening at MSNBC.   Its gigantic unwieldy media parent, Comcast, has spun out MSNBC along with a bunch of other cable channels with declining revenue into a separate entity, leaving NBC News and streaming operations behind.  As a separate entity the motley collection of properties could easily be swallowed by a private equity vulture, leveraged up, and stripped for cash and parts.

If cable news and late night comedy go the way of newspapers, we will be in even greater danger.  Already we are dealing with an environment in which most people get what they believe is information from uncurated or rigged garbage outlets.  If the only alternative to social media drivel is the brave work of a band of independent journalists, then reliable information, like health care, decent housing, and college, will become available only to a relatively privileged few.  

If the only mass media left are controlled by the immortal Rupert Murdoch, Ketamine Leon, Larry Ellison, and Vladimir Putin, the chances for a restoration of democracy and decency in America will be that much less. 

It may be impossible to ever determine whether the loss of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was caused by political pressure or real economic concerns. Either way, we, and what's left of our country, are the losers.  

And that's the way it is. 

From the Public Editor: The New York Times is boldly doing terrible work, critics say

Editors’ Note: Once upon a time, the New York Times decided that its readers deserved an advocate who would review their concerns about its work product, investigate, and report their findings. It worked well — for the readers that is. After a few years, the Times mandarins decided that it no longer needed anyone to critique its work, presumably because in their minds it was flawless. So they s***tcanned the public editor and everything worked out great, for the easily bruised sensibilities of Times hacks, that is.

For the rest of us, not so much. It turns out the Times gets stuff wrong. A lot. For that reason, at least one former public editor, the formidable Margaret Sullivan, has continued her fearless criticism in The Guardian. To further assist her and others, the Spy has appointed its own Meta-Content Generator, A.J. Liebling, to serve as the Public Editor in Exile. He’s got a lot on his plate.

By A.J.Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

With America in the midst of a sustained attack on every institution of its democracy, we need a strong and fearless free press to keep us informed of the latest outrages without pulling any punches or allowing itself to be sidetracked into irrelevant detours.

Instead we have The New York Times. Its repeated failures to properly report what’s going on have taken on even greater importance given the collapse of once-formidable competitors like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, both destroyed by their weirdo plutocratic owners, and the intentional and illegal assault on broadcasters like CBS and ABC/Disney.

In the current crisis its misadventures have become more remarkable and more glaring. It has also shown a repeated inability to accept any criticism or correct its lapses.

Consider its coverage of the now Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York, a bright young spark plug by the name of Zohran Mamdani. Or as is he is invariably referred to in Times news coverage, “democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.” His revolting once and future opponent, Handsy Andy Cuomo, never earned a similar epithet, like “sex pest Andy Cuomo” or “disgraced former Governor Cuomo,” for some reason.

The Times in its defense says that while Mamdani identifies as a “democratic socialist,” his opponent does not identify as a “sex offender,” despite clear evidence of same. “Democratic socialism” is, despite its name, not an ideology that calls for the nationalization of all means of production. Rather it seems to contemplate a well-knit social safety net and publicly-owned institutions to fill the gaps caused by market failures. Like housing and mass transit.

But that’s not the problem. The Times has taken a dislike to Mr. Mamdani for reasons best known to it and its plutocratic publisher, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI, who got his job the old-fashioned meritocratic way: from his daddy, the owner.

Two weeks ago, in a supposed scoop that violated Times standards on anonymous sourcing, the Times received stolen confidential Columbia admission files. That in itself is unforgivable. These are not the Pentagon Papers, which discuss matters of national policy. These are the personal private applications of 17 year old kids for admission, together with the notes of the Columbia admissions office. In short they are none of anyone’s business.

Thought experiment: do you think your college applications should be a matter of public record? Do you think the world should know that you boasted of being the most valuable player on your water polo team, even though your school didn’t have one? Or that you reminded the admissions committee that generations of your ancestors had been admitted to Columbia and given generously thereafter, like, we don’t know, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI?

The documents had been provided to the Times by a virulently racist crackpot as part of the ongoing campaign to delegitimize any and all efforts to diversify the distribution of benefits in society beyond rich entitled white men. Like King Arthur.

Reliable source, according to The New York Times

What was in these private personal files that constituted news that the public had a right to know? Wait for it: on his application Mamdani, an immigrant of South Asian ancestry born in Uganda, checked the boxes as both Asian and African. Hot tip for Times hacks: do a search online of what continent Uganda is in, and let us know what you find. Maybe they still have one of those spherical things hanging around with the map of the world printed on it.

To the Times, and the racist reactionaries who stole the personal files and provided quotes, like lying reactionary plug ugly (and favorite Times source, quoted 167 times in the last three years) Chris Rufo, this was huge news. 

The stolen application data raised questions, at least in the fevered imaginations of Times hacks and their racist sources, of whether Mamdani had somehow misrepresented himself to obtain admission (which he didn’t by the way). 

 Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor (remember her?) said

The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.

For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.

Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication....The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.

In response to this well-founded criticism, the Times trotted out a hack named Patrick Healy, who used to preside over Republican-rigged focus groups designed to palm off Republican talking points as the true voice of the great unwashed and now serves as the chief bottle-washer for “standards” and “trust.”

He justified this illegal smear by noting that when asked about his application, Mamdani, instead of telling the Times to go s*** in its hat, confirmed the truth of the matter. To Healy, that transformed a story based on stolen documents peddled by racists into an impeccably sourced story. That didn’t make it newsworthy, though.

Soledad O’Brien ‘86, proud to be multiracial herself, said: 

The Times’s second rationalization was that since so many people were talking about the story, the story must have been worth reporting. A lot of people would talk about a picture of King Arthur XVI fornicating with underaged goats on his upstate retreat too, but that doesn’t make it a story.

Having rejected out of hand the concerns expressed by serious journalists like O’Brien, Sullivan, and James Fallows, the Times tripled down on its blunder. First Times Supremo Joe “Where’s My Chair?” Kahn told the newsroom he was proud of his pisspoor story. Then he or someone commissioned an ass-covering follow-up, supposedly reporting on the difficulty applicants have of choosing their race and ethnic background on check-the-boxes forms. This might be a story, but it doesn’t serve to retcon the Times’s trafficking in personal documents stolen by racist weirdos.

But the best explanation may be that the Times believes that personal information is newsworthy when it’s about public figures. At least if they’re Democrats.

Consider its endless coverage over the past year over Joe Biden’s supposed debility and unfitness for office. Although neither the Times nor anyone else ever presented a shred of evidence demonstrating that a single one of Biden’s many decisions as President was affected by incapacity, his slow gait, stutter, and loss of stamina were said to be crippling debilities that made it impossible for him to continue as President.

We don’t intended to relitigate that one, but we will point out that the number of Times’s stories questioning Biden’s capacity versus the number questioning the cognitive state of the current incumbent stands at about 293 to zero.

Pro tip: read A1 before you consume one of these tasty recipes

This is despite daily efflorescences of Pol Potbelly’s raging dementia, whether claiming at the same time that he did and did not know that one of his subversive flunkies had cut off weapons supplies to Ukraine without telling him, or imposing 50% tariffs on Brazil over an entirely fair trial of a Brazilian national, or continuing to assert whoppers like whale-killing windmills or China having no wind or solar power.

You might think that such daily lapses would at least give rise to a thumbsucker or two about how they “raise questions” in the minds of “some critics” about the Dear Leader’s mental capacity. Not a word. The Times may be waiting for a brave Democratic politician (other than one tarred by the brush of democratic socialism) to state that the Emperor is prancing around the White House with his tiny toadstool swinging in the breeze because he is mad. But that’s no excuse: there’s plenty of credible persons out there raising those proverbial questions to justify one or 293 pieces about whether the man with the nuclear codes should be in a home.

To be fair, covering up the incapacity if not insanity of learning political figures has been a Times tradition for decades. You’d never know from reading the paper in real time that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a useless lush or his colleague Sen. Alphonse “Your winnings sir” D’Amato was a cheap hood, because they were favorites of King Arthur XIV and his liege, Cardinal Rosenthal.

But it’s not as if the Times is insensible to the feelings of those persecuted by Republican bigotry and intolerance. In some cases, it’s piling on.

Did you know that a tiny minority of your fellow citizens identify as a gender other than the one they presented with at birth? And that some of them seek well-accepted medical and surgical treatment to remedy this mismatch? It’s true!

And did you know that a small minority of them want to live their gender identity while still in school, including by playing on sports teams for that gender. If the idea of a 16-year-old trans girl placing soccer with the other girls in her class fills you with shock, horror, and loathing, then we’ve got a newspaper for you!

For years now, the Times has platformed the ravings of anti-trans bigots and their pseudo-“science” as if they were credible evidence that treating trans persons as they and their parents wish was somehow a bad thing.  They trumpeted a UK review of medical research on treating trans kids called the Cass Report. The report, after throwing out all medical evidence that trans kids benefited from gender-affirming treatment upon the grounds that the studies were not double-blind or placebo-controlled (how would that work?), concluded that there was a lack of evidence supporting gender affirming care.

When that report was exhaustively debunked and refuted the Times didn’t say anything or repudiate their pisspoor reporting. Recently they printed a guest essay on the pain suffered by trans kids who are denied treatment. To the Times, that constituted balanced coverage.

Justices Alito and Thomas were grateful for the support of the Times in holding that bigoted state law prohibitions on certain medical treatments when used to help trans people only were not sex discrimination. They cited as if it were real facts a series of idiotic Times roundups of anti-trans agitprop in support of their lawless conclusions:

Whether or not trans people are more or less likely to leave their pubic hair on soda cans was not discussed by Clarence “Leavin' on a Jet Plane” Thomas.

The point is not only that the Times violates standards of decent journalism pretty much every day. It’s that they seem to regard as outrageous any attempt to call them to account for it. When was the last time you read in the Times that they f**ked something up? We’ll wait.

Ultimately if the Times continues to burn its credibility due to its own arrogance and cowardice, two things will happen: it will no longer be taken seriously as a purveyor of important information outside of word games, recipes, and product reviews. And its audience will look to other sources for reliable information, including enterprising reporters setting up shop on Substack.

Independent writers like Judd Legum and Marisa Kabas are doing wonderful work. But we are the losers: No matter how successful they are, they are unlikely to have the reach and clout of the Times. As a result, the American public will be less able to comprehend the scope and depth of the ongoing Fascist coup against our country.

In the early 1940’s the Times’s failure to cover the Holocaust contributed to the failure of America to take steps to save European Jews. Today its failures are contributing to the death of American democracy. As in the 1940’s the consequences may be irreversible.

But at least the puzzles are fun and the recipes scrumptious.

A July 4 obituary edition: American democracy, dead at 249.

The lamps have gone out all over America.  

By Isaiah Thomas
Board of Editors

This publication was established 255 years ago to advocate for the independence of the then British colonies and the establishment of a democratic Constitutional republic that would rule according to laws enacted with the consent of the governed and dedicated to the proposition that government existed to protect the rights and advance the interests of the governed.

Six years later, on July 4, 1776, the Spy's efforts were crowned with success by the signature of the Declaration of Independence, which established the United States of America as a democratic republic.

At some point in the latter half of its 249th year, that government died.  

On this July 4, 2025, we pause to pronounce and mourn its passing.

How do we know it has died? Consider:

– Just last week, the six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices decided that Article III courts lacked the power to prevent the Executive Branch from repealing Constitutional amendments on its own say so.  In particular, the infant children of certain types of immigrants will now be denied citizenship in clear contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment unless they themselves crawl into court and sue on the own behalf. Trump v. CASA, No. 24A884 (June 27, 2025).

As Professor Kate Shaw explained in a rare worthwhile essay in New York Times Opinion:

In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court could have definitively decided that Mr. Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship is flagrantly unconstitutional and may not be enforced. Instead, the court announced that it alone can decide such matters on a nationwide basis — and that it would not do so here. ...

Both the general tenor of the opinion and these instructions — to rapidly reconsider these cases in the context of an entirely new standard announced in an opinion that is far from clear — evinced a remarkable lack of respect for lower courts. And the decision comes at a time when district court judges have done more than any other constitutional players to maintain core constitutional protections. These are the same district judges who are facing unprecedented attacks online, threats to their safety and impeachment resolutions.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent: “Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.” 

– As part of its program to terrorize, torture, and eventually deport aliens with pending or no status (i.e. awaiting decisions on timely filed asylum petitions), the Executive Branch has arrogated to itself the right and power to:

• arrest and detain legal permanent residents of the United States for expressing opinions disagreeable to the President
• summarily deport in the unreviewable discretion of the Secretary of State any alien he determines to be an “enemy” and to not just deport them but deliver them variously to a foreign concentration camp or a third country war zone regardless of whether the alien will face torture in either hellhole
• concoct criminal prosecutions against sitting members of Congress for seeking to exercise their legal right to inspect immigration detention facilities
• tackle and beat U.S. Senators for attempting to ask a Cabinet Secretary a question as part of their Article I duty to oversee the U.S. Government
• beat and arrest not just persons suspected without probable cause for lacking immigration status satisfactory to them but also American citizens for attempting to protect those individuals and their and their own constitutional rights:

 

• and commence illegal denaturalization proceedings against US citizens for failing to agree with the President 

But the unconstitutional actions of an out-of-control Presidency go far beyond torturing immigrants and beating dissenters.  In the past six months, the Executive has unconstitutionally

• terminated federal agencies established by Congress and cut off their funding, resulting in the likely deaths of millions of starving children and families in famine-ravaged lands
• cut off legally appropriated and awarded funding to research universities to force them to submit to the political will and bigoted views of the current President
• imposed tariffs without the consent of the Congress as required by Article I 
• illegally deployed US military forces into American cities to harass and oppress the populace
• allied with the Russian aggressor in Ukraine in defiance of Congressional action
• threatened to conquer by military force all or part of nations allied with the United States
• pardoned 1,500 convicted insurrectionists and then hired some of them to work in, wait for it, the Justice Department
• purged the Justice Department of career prosecutors who acted in accordance with the law but not the whim of the Executive; and
• demanded bribes from media corporations to punish them for speaking truth and from others to line his own pockets in multiple scams  

None of these actions can be reconciled with the American Constitution, the rule of law, or the separation of powers. 

What happened?

The causes of the collapse of the American Republic are many and deep rooted, although they can all be traced to the contradictions of its founding: the tension between establishing the dignity and equality of all human beings and the reality of granting excessive power to white slavers and racists to perpetuate their cruel oligarchy.

In the 21st century, several different strands of white power were woven together into a rope strong enough to pull down the structure of American government.  A Republican-dominated Supreme Court first overturned the voters' verdict in the 2000 election, preserving Republican domination of the Court for a generation.  Later it lawlessly voided a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for suppression of minority and Democratic votes. 

That same Republican-packed Supreme Court in turn cemented the domination of Republicans by sanctioning unlimited plutocratic dark money in politics under the guise of “free speech.”  It furthered Republican gerrymandering of Congressional seats for blatant political advantage, thereby permitting partisan politicians to stifle the popular will.

As a result of these decisions, the Republican Party in the Congress became increasingly dominated by corrupt reactionaries dependent on the favor of a depraved President to remain in office.  Both these developments destroyed the separation of powers and key checks against Executive Branch tyranny. 

Today for example the House approved a cruel unpopular bill to starve and sicken the poor and grant huge tax cuts to billionaires.  The margin was 218 to 214.  That's two votes.  The Republican gerrymander of swing-state North Carolina in 2024 gave the Republican three new seats, or more than the margin of victory the Republicans enjoyed today. 

Devoted Fox News watcher

Soon the Republican Texas legislature is planning to redistrict Texas Congressional seats in the absence of any new Census data to unseat Democrats they don't like, like Jasmine Crockett.  A similar effort in 2003 generated five more seats for Texas Republicans.  

A second factor has been the transformation of the media into emasculated irrelevance (like the networks and major newspapers) or nonstop disinformation volcanoes whose lies have sunk into and eaten the brains of millions of white Americans:

...there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.

....Any salesperson or con artist will tell you that you can’t incept a thought in a mark’s mind out of nowhere. You have to find the hook that’s already there — fear, or desire — and exploit it. When it comes to exacerbating and honing the anxieties of aging Americans you can’t do much better (or worse) than race and immigration.

Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. 

Which leads us to the overarching cause of the death of the American republic: perpetuation of white plutocratic power by whatever means necessary. This has been a battle since the founding of our Republic, according to Prof. Heather Cox Richardson:   

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system.  

It took the French five tries to get it right

Even as we face the reality that the American First Republic (or Second if you regard Reconstruction as the establishment of a new and better regime) has passed, the response cannot be either despair or acquiescence.  

France after all is now on its Fifth Republic and when we were there two weeks ago, it seemed pretty jolly.  If the French can re-establish a stable democratic Republic and still have time to hang out in cafés, we can do the same.

While the forces that destroyed the American Republic remain powerful, they are by no means invulnerable.  In any event, the future has a funny way of surprising us.  In this century alone we have endured a mass terror attack, an economic meltdown, a pandemic, and puppy killer Kristi Noem.  We are likely to be confronted by similarly consequential evens in the future: another pandemic, another economic collapse, war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons, and another animal murderer.  Each crisis creates an opportunity.

But that may or may not happen in the lifetimes of anyone writing or reading these words.

In the meantime it is for us the living to record the demise of a promising experiment in democratic government and to assign blame for its death where it is due: on white people.