The Media is (Really!) Not Part of the Liberal Family

When I think of what I, as a liberal, want the media to do, it's really quite simple: just tell me what's happening -- without varnish, horserace hypothesizing, or "sanewashing". I don't need them to lie to me. I don't need them to confirm my priors. I don't need to have "bad" news hidden from me. I don't need or want a liberal version of Fox News. Just tell me what's going on! 

For example, immediately after the election and Trump's victory, the stock market went way up. It seems the market was happy with Trump's victory (alongside, I'm guessing, general happiness that the outcome was decisive). As a Democrat, that's not pleasant to see -- but still, I didn't need anyone to hide that fact. I didn't need to construct some Potemkin coverage where it didn't happen. I didn't even need some side-eye slant about how it turns out "the elites" seem rather elated at Trump's triumph (I can make that inference on my own). Just tell me the truth. It will suffice.

Now, I fully admit that this "simple" request isn't so simple. Nonetheless, even accounting for its easier-said-than-done character, there's little doubt that the media has been abjectly terrible at this. And while the reasons behind it are myriad, one answer I keep returning to is an argument I made back in 2018: namely, that the media thinks of itself as part of the liberal "family".

It may be counterintuitive why that leads to conservative media bias. But the idea is that, to the extent journalists fundamentally see themselves as liberals talking to liberals, then there isn't much need to report on various dangers and predations of conservatives. "We" already know that. There's nothing new here. If anything, the job of a journalist is to disturb "our" preexisting narratives. And since the "we" and the "our" are all imagined to be liberals, we get an endless stream of apologetics, explainers, and sanewashing of conservative extremism.oooo

But I said in 2018 and I'll say it now: regardless of the personal politics of any particular editor or journalist, the media is not part of the liberal family. They should not presume their only audience is liberals, they should not assume that their job is to give liberals "the other side of the story", because they should view conservatives (or liberals) as "the other side" to begin with. This is related to something Jamelle Bouie wrote recently: the political media has a bad habit of thinking its job is to play amateur political strategist for Democrats, instead of just trying to accurately report on what's happening in the world. When we're talking about Biden's alleged mental decline or Trump's rambling political speeches, we don't need hypothesizing about how this is playing out in swing states. Just -- tell us what's happening. Report Trump's speech. Report Biden's speech. The audience can decide for itself whether this reality is "good news" or not for Democrats or Republicans.

I admit, there is a small part of me that harbors hope that the surrenderist policy taken by many journalistic "elites" towards Trump -- exemplified by the owners of the Washington Post and LA Times craven non-endorsement decisions -- might disabuse some other members of the legacy journalist community of the naive notion that "everyone" (who counts) already knows how dangerous Trump and his cronies are. The increasingly evident truth that this assessment is not universally-held (obviously it's not!) should, in an ideal world, dissipate the notion that straightforward, accurate recounting of what's going on in Trumpland is in some way preaching to the choir or superfluous repetition of obvious truths. And likewise, it should be obvious right now that the main "bias" the media needs to combat within itself is not a propensity to overtell liberal narratives, it's an instinct to self-censor truths inconvenient to conservatives because it's viewed as gilding the lily.

On this score, the early returns are not good -- the media is already racing to sanewash RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx positions on the apparent premise that "we all" know why vaccines are healthful, and need to understand the argument for why they're dangerous. The reality, though, is that we don't all know that vaccines are healthful, and lots of people need to be educated on why avoiding or tamping down on vaccines is what's dangerous.

This, ultimately, is what it actually means to speak to an audience of conservatives and liberals alike. It's not about being evermore coddling and accommodating of conservative conspiracism -- that's never going to work. Ultimately, it means remembering that not "everyone" knows and accepts truths inconvenient for contemporary conservatism, and when reality poses facts troublesome to a conservative reader, it is the media's job to report those facts without varnish or sugarcoating. To borrow from Harry Truman: you're not giving your conservative readers hell -- you just telling them the truth, and they're calling it hell.

Will Matt Gaetz Finally Cause the Senate GOP To Stand Up To Trump? My Money's On No!

I really thought I'd laid the bar on the floor, but somehow Donald Trump has already burrowed under it by announcing (former*) Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. I had the pleasure of sharing this news with several of my law school colleagues, where it literally provoked a laugh-out-loud howl of incredulity.

It wasn't just my people though. Senate Republicans also seem rather blindsided by the pick:

The selection of Mr. Gaetz blindsided many of Mr. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. The announcement was met with immediate and unvarnished skepticism by Republicans in the Senate who will vote on his nomination. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the pick — and predicted a difficult confirmation process.

[....]

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s selection, said, “I don’t know the man other than his public persona.”

Mr. Cornyn said he could not comment on the chances that Mr. Gaetz, or Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, would be confirmed: “I don’t know — we’ll find out.”

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said as other senators dodged questions from reporters.

Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, told reporters that many members of the G.O.P. conference were shocked at the choice of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, but mostly thrilled at the prospect that he might no longer be a member of the chamber.

The House, Mr. Miller added, would be a more functional place without Mr. Gaetz.

He predicted a bruising confirmation fight, adding that if the process revealed evidence to corroborate the allegations of sex trafficking against Mr. Gaetz, he would not be surprised if the House moved to expel him, as it did with Representative George Santos. Mr. Santos lost his seat after the Ethics Committee documented violations of the chamber’s rules and evidence of extensive campaign fraud.  

But things aren't all bad. You'll never guessed who raced ahead of the pack to greet Trump's failson pick with open arms:

One of the few lawmakers to offer a positive assessment was a staunch Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called Mr. Gaetz “smart” and “clever” but predicted tough confirmation hearings.

So, how long will it take for the Senate GOP caucus to fall in line? I'm guessing it'll happen before the first confirmation hearing. (That is, if we have confirmation hearings).

Oh, and speaking of organizations that have put their dignity in a lockbox, we did finally learn what bridge is too far for the ADL, which blistered the Gaetz selection because of his "long history of trafficking in antisemitism," including "defending the Great Replacement Theory." How he's distinguished from the ADL's glowingly-praised Elise Stefanik, who also promoted Great Replacement Theory, was left unsaid.

* Gaetz hastily resigned his seat following the announcement, also getting ahead of a planned House Ethics Committee report that was set to issue findings on Gaetz's myriad, er, "controversies" -- including allegations of sex trafficking minors. Score one for QAnon!

The Shrapnel Marked "Occupant"

There's an old saying passed around by soldiers, that goes something like: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant'."

The point of the story is to impress the fundamental impersonality of war. Who lives, who dies -- there's nothing special about it. The bullet or bomb or rocket doesn't care about you; the person firing it doesn't care about you either. In 99.9% of cases, it has nothing to do with you in any meaningful sense. We have for ourselves a thick understanding of our own choices and values and importance, but none of that really plays any role in who gets hurt. The bullet that comes for us almost certainly will not have our "name on it".

At one level, this outlook is a corrective to main character syndrome, where we all imagine ourselves to be very special indeed, and so the reasons good or bad things happen to us relate to our specialness and our special choices. The bullet is inscribed with my name because I made distinctive choices which made someone take notice of me and decide to specifically take me out. 

But at another level, this saying is also about undermining a sense of security based around our own ordinariness. In many respects, most of us I think don't imagine ourselves as "special". We don't stand out, we don't see ourselves as making some sort of radical or impactful choice that would cause someone else to go to the trouble of crafting a bullet specially for us. I'm just a regular guy, doing ordinary things. There's nothing special about me, so why would anyone bother to target me, of all the people in the world? And the answer is that maybe they wouldn't -- but the shrapnel marked "occupant" is distinguished precisely because it doesn't bother to target at all. Your mundanity will not save you.

I've been thinking about all of this in relation to my own coping mechanisms as I envision what the future might hold over the next four years. One mode of "reassurance" is to tell oneself that Trump and Trumpists aren't really going to go after me; they are targeting other, more distinctive communities (such an immigrants, or trans individuals). Of course, this cope might not even be right on its own terms (it's entirely plausible he will target, e.g., Jewish college professors). And to the extent it is right, even thinking this way wracks me with guilt -- "I feel better knowing it's others who will be hurt".

But there's a more fundamental problem at work here. Finding reassurance in terms of who is likely to be "targeted" tries to find security in normalcy and ordinariness. It's that notion of "I'm just a regular guy, I'm doing nothing special or out of the ordinary -- why would anyone bother to come after me?" And again, I think that self-conception is incredibly common. Some of you might have seen interviews with undocumented immigrants who claimed that, if they could vote, they would have backed Trump. This feels inconceivable -- how could they do that, when Trump says he wants to enforce their deportation en masse? The answer they give is basically: "he's not talking about me." Why would he be? I'm just trying to work hard and build a better life for my family. He must be talking about the criminals and the rapists and the predators. I'm just a normal guy, doing normal things. There's no reason why someone would go through so much trouble just to hurt me.

This in-depth story from a few months ago, about a trans girl in Florida who was on her middle school's volleyball team. The reassurance her mother tried to draw on was entirely centered around her daughter's ordinary mundaneness -- she's just a regular tween, going through normal adolescent experiences, who wants to play a sport. She's not even an especially good volleyball player! Who could be bothered to care about something so fundamentally normal?

Of course, it doesn't work. Her normalcy doesn't save her. Now certainly, in the Florida case one could say that this kid absolutely was personally targeted (the article suggests there were only two trans female athletes in the entire state at the time). The school board, the police, and so on -- they very much went after her when they found out she was trans and participating in public school athletics. But in a truer sense, I don't think it's accurate to say that what happened had anything to do with "her" at all. She is better described as the victim of the GOP's saturation bombing directed at the trans community, broadly; a campaign that self-consciously does not care about any of its victims as individuals. It's not about her. She's simply the occupant.

If one wants to catastrophize further, I sometimes think about what would happen if our newly-elected overlords got us into a global hot war (Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense is a Fox News personality who openly promoted the idea of a first strike attack on North Korea). It feels, and some sense is, cosmically unfair that such a war would effect me. What do I have to do with anything? I didn't vote for this! I think this whole thing is stupid! But what's true for soldiers is even more true for civilians caught in war zones -- we're all just regular people, and our regularity simply does not matter (this insight applies to other civilians who are actually, and not just hypothetically, stuck in actual war zones right now). If the rockets start raining down on Portland, it will do me no good to call out to them and say "I had nothing to do with us -- go over there!" They in no way will have my name on them, and they will  nonetheless be implacably indifferent to me.

Perhaps the moral of the story, then, is to not be afraid to stand up. Your normalcy, your ordinariness won't save you. Maybe it should, but it won't. It may or may not surprise you to know that this conclusion is very hard for me to grasp onto. I actually don't have any desire to stand out, I'm not looking to present a visage one cannot look away from. I'm fine doing "ordinary" politics and writing and participation, but I have no desire to be special beyond that. My fondest wish is that the world leave me alone and I leave it alone in turn.

But that probably isn't going to be an option. Someone like me may or may not be directly targeted for abuse and oppression -- as a Jew, as an academic, or as a Democrat. But targeted or no, there's always the chance that some shrapnel will find me as an "occupant". I don't think of myself as particularly special or distinct, I have no illusions that I represent some critical node in the Resistance to Trumpist oppression. I'm just a regular, normal guy. But normalcy will not keep me safe.

Yet More Trumpist Humiliation of the ADL

I really don't intend for my post-election coverage to be so ADL-centric. But I can't help but be struck at the degree to which Trump's Jewish and Israel-related decision-making might as well be solely based on how to personally humiliate the ADL, and prompt them into embarrassing and degrading acts of submission and hypocrisy, to the greatest extent possible.

For example, Trump's announced pick for UN Ambassador is New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. One of my basic rules of 2024 political observation was that "one does not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Elise Stefanik," who defined the term bad-faith grandstanding when it came to her supposed objections to campus antisemitism even as she was directly promoting dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories on her own. 

But alas, the ADL eagerly jumped in with praise for the selection, allowing us to juxtapose this:

next to this:

Like I said -- just abject, humiliating supplication. It couldn't be more pathetic.

Or consider the position of United States Ambassador to Israel. If ever past was prologue, this is it. The first time Donald Trump was elected, he appointed an ambassador to Israel who referred to liberal Jews as "kapos". The ADL maintained a studious silence, a choice which I maintained "sold out" a substantial swath of the Jewish community that it purportedly was tasked to protect.

This time around, the nominee is going to be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has an even more illustrative history with the ADL. You see, back in 2011, the following sequence occurred:

1. Huckabee made spurious and offensive analogies to the Holocaust (comparing it to, of all things, the national debt).
2. The ADL publicly took exception.
3. Huckabee threatened the ADL.
4. The ADL scampered backwards and issued a groveling apology.

So here, at least, the ADL already got ahead of schedule, and I look forward to some embarrassingly effusive praise directed towards Huckabee to emerge forthwith.

What we saw in 2016, is only going to be worse in 2024. That's true on many levels, but for the ADL in particular it is evidently apparent -- they will sell us out. They will take vulnerable American Jews, who are rightfully terrified about emergent Christian nationalism and White supremacy and violent extremism and, yes, left-wing campus antisemitism too*, and they will leave us to twist. They will do it regularly, and repeatedly, and without hesitation, and for an embarrassingly cheap payoff.

* I include this because, by cuddling up to the far-right powers that be, the ADL will necessarily kneecap any ability to effectively fight campus antisemitism, though they certainly will retain the capacity to yell about it. The sorts of tactics which actually might tamp down on and respond to campus antisemitism, versus the sorts of tactics which yield good Fox News ragebait and can justify blowing up the Department of Education, are not compatible with one another, and the ADL is going to lash itself to the latter at the expense of the former. While there still may be utility in what the ADL can do for someone like me on the local level, in terms of a cohesive, national strategy I do not have any more confidence in the ADL's ability to effectively protect me from campus antisemitism than I have confidence in its ability to protect me from conservative antisemitism.