and I think we know what they might be
That is not a parody. I don’t know what to say.
It’s hard for me to believe this isn’t some kind of elaborate joke. But apparently, it isn’t.
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2022
So says, a former social media executive
This is a fascinating look at the business of social media:
I’ve now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon’s offer for Twitter.
So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)
I think if Elon takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain. He has no idea.
There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005), that had a very strong free speech culture.
This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet.
(Remember when it seemed very important to certain people that we ban things like this?)
Many of the older tech leaders today (@elonmusk, @pmarca, etc, GenXers basically) grew up with that internet. To them, the internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit, and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind.
I believe that too.
But I also ran Reddit.
Reddit was born in the last years of the “old internet” when free speech meant “freedom from religious conservatives trying to take down porn and sometimes first-person shooters.” And so we tried to preserve that ideal.
That is not what free speech is about today.
It’s not that the principle is no longer valid (it is), it’s that the practical issues around upholding that principle are different, because the world has changed.
The internet is not a “frontier” where people can go “to be free,” it’s where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it.
It’s the MAIN battlefield for our culture wars.
It means that upholding free speech means you’re not standing up against some religious conservatives lobbying to remove Judy Blume books from the library, it means you’re standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
(It’s also where Russia is fighting a real war against us, using free speech literally. But that’s another story too)
Free speech may be noble, but here’s what’s it’s like these days:
All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence …
… of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they’ve said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass.
Woke friends: it’s true, right? You have LOTS of examples.
All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when…
… the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they’ve said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.
Right-wingers and libertarians: it’s true, right? You can remember PLENTY of examples.
Neither side is lying.
Mostly, it’s really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors. There’s a separate emerging problem (more FB than Twitter) where AI models make inhumane/dystopian judgments that can’t be appealed, but that’s a separate issue.
Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.
“All the top executives and board members are men.”
“Silicon Valley employees are overwhelming woke and left-wing.”
I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you’re on the left or right of this issue, because you probably think one of those things.
And the old GenX tech titans are right there with you – vaguely left-wing but also center-right – seeing their version of “censorship” – and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it about what’s happening with the management of social platforms.
Elon is one of those, because he doesn’t understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture.
I KNOW he doesn’t, because he was pretty late to Bitcoin, and if he’d been plugged in to internet culture he would’ve been on Bitcoin way earlier.
Elon’s been too busy doing Actual Real Things like making electric cars and reusable rockets and fucking actresses/singers, so he has a Pretty Fucking Good Excuse For Not Paying Attention but this is also something that’s hard to understand unless you’ve RUN a social network.
I’m now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit):
Are you ready?
Here it is…
They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
That’s all.
They DON’T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don’t.
Donald Trump was not de-platformed for being right-wing.
I talk a bit about this in my thread about Omega Events:
Yes, the execs are (whatever demographic) and the employees are (whatever politics) but they don’t care about it. They don’t.
Facebook’s userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning, then bifurcated. So has Reddit’s. Twitter’s also. The social platforms don’t care.
They kind of care about money, but mostly they wish you would shut up and be civil.
But that is impossible: they (we) made a platform where anyone can say anything, largely without consequence, so people are going to be their worst selves, and social networking is now The Internet, and everyone is on it (thank you @chamath), saying WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT.
But the platforms have to be polite. They have to pretend to enforce fairness. They have to adopt “principles.”
Let me tell you: There are no real principles. They are just trying to be fair because if they weren’t, everyone would yell LOUDER and the problem would be worse.
What happens is that because of the fundamental structural nature of social networks, it is always possible for a corner case to emerge where people get into an explosive fight and the company running the social network has to step in.
Again: Omega Events
Because human variability and behavior is infinite. And when that happens, the social network has to make up a new rule, or “derive” it from some prior stated principle, and over time it’s really just a tortured game of Twister.
You really want to avoid censorship on social networks? Here is the solution:
Stop arguing. Play nice. The catch: everyone has to do it at once.
I guarantee you, if you do that, there will be NO CENSORSHIP OF ANY TOPIC on any social network.
Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.
(This is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted)
The problem with social networks is the SOCIAL (people) part. Not the NETWORK (company).
“The best antidote to bad ideas is not to censor them, but to allow debate and better ideas.”
How naive.
“Debate” is a vague term, and what a social network observes that causes them to “censor” something is masses of people engaging in “debate” – that is to say: abusive volumes of activity violating spam and harrassment rules, sometimes prompting off-site real-world harm.
This is what you think of when you hear “debate.”
This is not what is happening on social networks today.
Example: the “lab leak” theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was “censored” at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the “debate” included …
massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world – e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.
Why is this link not being censored now? Hypocrisy? Because the facts changed?
It was “censored” not because it was a wrong idea, but because ideas really can – at certain times and places – become lightning rods for actual, physical, kinetic mob behavior.
That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS.
I’m sorry, it’s just true.
It would have been perfectly acceptable if the lab leak theory were being discussed in a rational, evidence-based manner by scientists on Twitter, but that is not what happened.
Replace “lab leak theory” with whatever topic you think has been unfairly censored, and the reason it was censored (or any other action taken against it) is not because of the content of that topic, I ABSOLUTELY ASSURE YOU.
It is because at Certain Times, given Certain Circumstances, humans will Behave Badly when confronted with Certain Ideas, and if you are The Main Platform Where That Idea is Being Discussed, you cannot do NOTHING, because otherwise humans will continue behaving badly.
Here is what I think about Twitter:
I think the last few years of @jack‘s administration have been the best years of Twitter’s history.
I think Jack really matured as an exec, his prior experience with Twitter, then his success with Square (i.e. doing it wrong, then doing it right) really raised him to a world-class CEO level, and Twitter finally got to be “pretty good.”
And “pretty good” is about as good as any social network can possibly be, in my opinion.
(@jack, if you are reading this, my hat’s off to you. Saying this as one of the few people who have ever run a social platform: you showed the world how it should’ve been done)
There is a reason why Jack has a crazy meditation routine and eats one meal a deal and goes on spiritual retreats. Because it takes an INHUMAN level of mentality to be able to run something like this.
Because the problems are NOT about politics, or topics of discussion. They are about all the ways that humans misbehave when there are no immediately visible consequences, when talking to (essentially) strangers, and the endless ingenuity they display trying to get around rules.
These last few years, @jack did a really good job.
And whoever the midwits were who didn’t think so have kicked him out, and now Elon thinks he’s going to come in and fix some problems.
Elon is not going to fix some problems. I am absolutely sure of this. He has no idea what he’s in for.
(He might hire back Jack, which might be ok, but I don’t know if Jack wants the job. Who knows. All the tech titans are buddies, kind of)
Elon is going to try like heck to “fix” the problems he sees. Each problem he “fixes” will just cause 3 more problems.
And the worst part, the part that is going to hurt ALL OF HUMANITY, is that this will distract from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla, because it’s not just going to suck up his time and attention, IT WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE.
I mean, it’s not like he isn’t already an emotionally damaged guy. (Sorry Elon, it’s pretty obvious) But he has overcome a lot. And he does not need more trauma from running Twitter.
And I know I’m not just projecting my own traumas from the time of running Reddit, because:
Mark Zuckerberg talks about e-foiling in the mornings to avoid having to think about bad news coming in that’s like “being punched in the face.”
Ellen Pao was horrifically scarred by her run as Reddit CEO and the active harrassment, far beyond merely adjudicating community misbehavior.
Jack has his meditation retreats and unusual diets and spiritual journeys – he’s an odd guy yeah – but I’m pretty sure some of that is so he can cope with All You Fucking Assholes.
Never heard much from Dick Costolo, but I haven’t seen him do much stand-up improv since he left Twitter, have you? Dick might still be recovering.
It’s not a fun job, and it’s not like how anyone on the outside imagines. Elon is a very public personality, and he will be faulted by ALL SIDES any time Twitter Does Anything to Solve A Problem, even if he isn’t the CEO.
“Why is chairman of the board @elonmusk standing by while @<newtwitterceo> is doing X, which is wrecking Y?”
“@elonmusk, how can you allow X horrible thing to happen? I thought you were against censorship!”
So: my take is this:
@elonmusk, I’m all with you on the Values Of The Old Internet.
This is not The Old Internet. That is gone. It is sad. It’s not because the platforms killed it.
It is because we brought all of our old horrible collective dysfunctions onto the internet, and the internet is very fast and everyone can say anything to anyone, and the place where that happens the most is on the social platforms.
(It doesn’t happen very often on e.g. Amazon, except when it does, and of course that’s when Amazon Censors You!)
After Reddit, I took a break, and now I work in the world of Real Atoms.
https://www.terraformation.com/
It is hard. It is VERY hard. Like eating glass, as Elon would put it.
But it is not as hard as running a social network. And if Elon knows what’s good for him AND HUMANITY, he won’t do it – he will stick with the Real Atoms, which is what we really need.
If you like this thread, here’s some more stuff about what I’m working on and how you can support it:
And if you want the Next Big Thing:
Addenda: a few people have interpreted this thread as meaning that I support or that it was a justification for censorship.
(That is a reasonable misinterpretation) but it is not true.
I am very much against censorship. I am, for example, against the censorship of every topic that the social networks blocked during the pandemic especially. I have personally been harmed by this.
However, I also understand many non-obvious things about the complex dynamics that arise in large social network platforms, and I will tell you this:
Censorship is inevitable on large social network platforms. If you run one of sufficient size, you will be FORCED to censor things. Not by governments, or even by “users,” but by the emergent dynamics of the social network itself.
Someone also said something like, “it’s unacceptable that anyone be considered the omniscient arbiter of what’s true or not” (sorry if I’m misquoting you; there’s a lot of replies)
I also agree with that. It is impossible for anyone to do, and also terrible.
Yet, the structure and dynamics of running a large social network will FORCE you to do it.
IIRC, almost every large social platform started out wanting to uphold free speech. They all buckle.
And it’s not because certain ideas are good or bad, or true or false. It has to do purely with operational issues that arise with humans that disagree in large numbers on digital platforms.
The social platforms aren’t censoring you (or some idea you like) because they disagree with you. They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS.
(That is the whole point. Ideas wouldn’t be worth much if they weren’t dangerous or powerful. But you can’t always control what people are going to do with powerful things)
What they censor has little to do with what is true or false. It has a little bit to do with whatever the current politics are, but not in the way you probably expect.
Let me be clear: if you run a large social network, you will be forced by inexorable circumstance to censor certain things, you will be forced to “arbitrate” on topics you have an (inevitably) limited understanding of, and it will all be really really shitty.
(The alternative is just collapse of the platform, so I guess you do always have a choice – but then you’re not a social platform anymore)
The process through which all of that will happen is painful, which is why I don’t think Elon should do it. It is not a good use of his time, and I think his time is uniquely valuable and limited.
Originally tweeted by Yishan (@yishan) on April 15, 2022.
I have some personal experience with this. I shut down my comment section years ago and never brought it back because all the dynamics this guy describes were apparent even on my little blog. People were making it miserable to participate and it was off-putting to new readers who would read the nasty insults and crude comments about me and get an impression of what was going on here that wasn’t true. I didn’t have the time or the temperament to moderate it and frankly, it just depressed me to have to read some of the swill that appeared there. And he’s not wrong about it not being a right-left thing. I had some right wingers swoop in, of course, but many of the worst offenders were supposed liberals and leftists. It wasn’t a political thing it was a personality thing.
I suspect that if Musk takes over twitter, the whole thing will just fall apart for all the reasons outlined above. It will just become a hellspace in short order and it will lose all the attributes that make it useable. Assholes will enjoy making everyone miserable until the normal people lose interest and leave. It’s a sad comment on our species but we shouldn’t be surprised.
Republicans will pull out the stops they haven’t already
As I was saying, there is no safe harbor for Democratic candidates for what’s coming at them this year.
Jane Mayer reports on just one of the dark money groups bent on sliming Democrats. The American Accountability Foundation (A.A.F.) targets Democrats nominated for adminstration jobs. Candidates will fare no better, no matter how squeaky clean:
Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.
Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.
Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”
Mayer recounts more victims of this scandal-mining. And yes, that Vanderbilt- and Oxford-educated, faux-hayseed Sen. Kennedy (R-La.) from the O’Donnell tweet above. Omarova withdrew her nomination.
Kennedy is working the commie and “woke” angles against Democrats as a group. His Republican colleagues are teasing QAnon followers’ lizard brains with liberals-as-pedophiles nonsense of the sort that sent Edgar Maddison Welch of North Carolina to D.C. with an AR-15 loaded for Dermocrats. It’s take-no-prisoners politics flirting with provoking violence. Ask the D.C. and Capitol police injured in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Democrats had best show some spine and not turn the other cheek. Here’s how it’s done.
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The campaign industrial complex strikes again
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican officialFrom “Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)
Until he lost, I had not seen any of Jon Ossoff’s campaign ads when he ran for GA-6 in 2017. When finally I did, I sensed the sleep-inducing, dead hand of the campaign industrial complex.
Here are just two:
Makes you want to run right out and hire a nice, conservative accountant, doesn’t it?
Ossoff lost in 2017, but not the consultants who helped spend $23 million of his donors’ money on a U.S. House race. After some lessons learned and with inadvertent help from Donald Trump, Sen. Jon Ossoff got a second chance in 2021. His consultants likely got more work.
I don’t know if Ossoff was using a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-approved ad shop. But take their money and you normally have to use their pet vendors … even if they suck. His 2017 ads had that familiar, take-no-chances, cookie-cutter feel.
The ads above come to mind because this week the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in North Carolina released her first TV ad.
My heart sank into my shoes. I need that Senate seat. Your, dear reader, need that Senate seat. Cheri Beasley needs to do better.
A friend who ran for Congress supported by DCCC money ran a similar template for her first ad. A bit more animated, but it started exactly like Beasley’s: driving her car to show how just-like-you she is. My friend lost her 2004 race. But the “27B/6 — Candidate Intro” template survives in the political catalog to be sold by campaign professionals in 2022. This time to Cheri Beasley.
Beasley brought in decent but unremarkable money through the end of March: $8.6 million. But her campaign has been unremarkable as well. She’s won statewide as a judicial candidate twice before and lost her state supreme court seat by 401 votes in 2020, the Covid election. Running for Senate after running as a judge is a different skill set. Republicans will be merciless whatever safe, inoffensive campaign advisers insist she runs. Beasley’s first ad shows she’s not being well served by the campaign industrial complex, whether it hails from Washington, D.C. or Raleigh.
Candidates running these cookie-cutter ads do sometimes win. But safe will not cut it in 2022.
See, whatever you do, run against the government you want to administer. Reassure voters you won’t be partisan. You’re a different kind of politician. You’ll find common ground with the arsonists trying to burn down American democracy. Open your wallets now, won’t you?
She’s a mom (below). A mom who flies helicopters. And she wants you to know she, too, dislikes partisan politics, so she doesn’t want you to know she’s a Democrat. Because in 2022 people might think she’s a helicopter-flying pedophile who takes children for “rides.”
These lame efforts sparked this ad parody five years ago.
Whatever you do, DO NOT EVER repeat back (reinforce) your opponents’ smears, “I’m not a witch” style. If you’re a Republican in 2010:
Or a Democrat in 2018:
The Russ Feingold ad below by a shop in Milwaukee in 2004 is still a classic that plays against formula. But don’t expect anything like it from D.C. consultants from the campaign industrial complex.
Any number of Hollywood writers (and probably a few from Madison Avenue) itch to help Democratic candidates tell eye-catching, gripping stories for selling themselves to voters. But they are not part of the old-boy network that, win or lose, earns its living making sleep-inducing retreads like those above. Paid for by the candidate’s committee with your donations.
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I guarantee this will make you smile:
The labor market is the best in 50 years
New claims for unemployment benefits are trending at their lowest levels since 1968, a sign of how few layoffs are happening in the tightest labor market in half a century.
Job security today, by some measures, is even better than it was in the economic halcyon days of the late 1960s.
Behind today’s extremely tight labor market is a transformed U.S. economy, not least because its labor force is much bigger, including more women and more jobs in the service sector. The total number of people either working or looking for work is now 164 million, more than twice what it was in 1968.Average weekly claims by month per one thousand members of the labor force.
That means the layoffs-per-worker rate is significantly lower today than even the 1960s. In March, there were about 1.1 jobless claims per 1,000 people in the labor force—roughly half the 2.3 jobless claims per 1,000 recorded in 1968, according to an analysis of Labor Department data.
“Right now, Americans are experiencing the highest level of job security on record by many measures,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the University of Minnesota.
Oh no! That’s terrible!
Yes, inflation is high. It is slightly outpacing wage growth. And inflation is particularly hard on people on fixed incomes. But this story is also salient and it would be nice if it was flogged by the media with the same glee as the inflation numbers.
A little Good Friday anecdote
If you believe in such things, you might think that the sinking of that ship was a message:
The Russian warship that was confirmed as sunk on Thursday may have been carrying a holy relic when it went down.
The Moskva, a missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, sank on Thursday following an explosion onboard, Russian state media reported.
A news report from 2020 has given rise to the question of whether the vessel sank with a Christian relic — a piece of the “true cross” — onboard.
The Russian Orthodox Church announced in February 2020 that the relic had been delivered to the then-commander of the Black Sea fleet, Vice Admiral Igor Osipov, and was at the fleet’s headquarters, ready to deliver it to the ship “shortly,” the state-run Tass news agency reported at the time.
The relic in question is a fragment of wood just millimeters large that, according to believers, is a piece of the cross on which Christ was crucified, Tass said. That fragment is embedded in a 19th-century metal cross which is itself kept in a reliquary, according to the outlet.
The Moskva had a chapel onboard where sailors could pray, Sergiy Khalyuta, archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Sevastopol District, told Tass. He said the fragment was to be transferred at the request of its owner, an anonymous collector.
Insider was unable to establish when the relic was finally transferred to the Moskva or if it was onboard at the time of the vessel’s sinking. The Russian embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The sinking of the Moskva, a prized flagship, is a major blow to Russian morale, Western officials said.
Moscow has ignored claims of responsibility from Ukraine, which says it struck the ship with a long-range missile from land.
The exact details of how the ship sunk are still unclear. Russian officials said on Thursday that a fire caused an explosion of the ammunition onboard, prompting an evacuation of the crew.
CNN cited a person familiar with the intelligence as saying that the US believes Ukraine’s claims with “medium confidence.”
The Moskva attracted headlines at the outbreak of the war for an exchange with Ukrainian border guards on Zmynyii, or Snake, Island as the ship asked them to evacuate.
The resulting conversation — in which the guards told the ship’s crew to “go fuck yourself” — went viral and became a rallying cry for Ukraine’s war effort.
It’s not who you may think it was
Dean Baker points out that there is a president responsible for inflation in gas prices. It isn’t Joe Biden:
Trump demanded that Saudi Arabia cut back production back in 2020. According to Trump, he worked out a deal where OPEC producers would all agree to reduce their output. The reason we now have high oil prices is that they have not returned their production to pre-pandemic levels. Hey, by the media’s standards of what makes a politician responsible for an event in the world, this is practically airtight.
It’s more than a bit bizarre that Donald Trump literally boasted about getting oil producers to cut production, but somehow President Biden is held responsible for high gas prices.
I find it very easy to imagine that Trump and Jared persuaded the Saudis to do this for this very purpose.
I wonder why Democrats aren’t pointing this out?
Let’s just say it won’t be good
TNR asked some pundits and politicians what they think will happen:
Sen. Cory Booker
D-New Jersey
I’m concerned about all the steps that are being taken that are removing the safeguards that we had in the last election. And so what my worry is, is that the election comes and because of those anti-democratic changes or those voting rights changes, that we have real disagreements … that we end up having politicians making the decisions as opposed to people that are really independent…. It’s just the fragility of our democracy now, because a lot of the states whose leadership is denying that the last election has been fair and denying that Joe Biden is president, these folks are now trying to take measures that, should the same events happen next time, they’re there to try to strip the rightful winner of office because they just want it to be Donald Trump, no matter what.
Daniel Drezner
Professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University
It took Trump almost all of his four years to figure out just how some of the levers of government worked. By the end, however, he had begun to realize the power of personnel moves and executive action, particularly in foreign policy. So if Trump wins in 2024, I would anticipate that he would pursue his foreign policy vision in an unconstrained manner. This would include U.S. withdrawals from NATO and security agreements with Japan and South Korea for starters. Withdrawal from the World Trade Organization would also happen. There would also be a wholesale purge of civil servants in national security bureaucracies—essentially what happened at the State Department under Pompeo, but on steroids. Trump’s political appointments—assuming GOP control of the Senate and continued GOP subservience to Trump—would make his subpar first-term appointees look like a team of George Kennans in contrast.
Norm Eisen
Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and executive chair of the States United Democracy Center
I believe that if the bipartisan, voter-led, pro-democracy coalition that saved us in 2020 comes together again, that worst-case scenario can and will be avoided…. State officials had a critical part to play in that, since elections are national events that are resolved at the states, and we’re going to need all of them to do that again and to work even harder. But we do have a model for doing that, and I do think it can work again. If we all work hard together, it can happen.
Rick Hasen
Law professor at University of California, Irvine
The worst-case scenario is that we don’t have a fair election—that Donald Trump or someone following Donald Trump’s playbook does something that is going to lead to some kind of situation where the loser is declared the winner of the election…. That would mean the end of American democracy, at least for a time…. I think the most likely thing is some kind of legalistic argument that could try to have a state legislature overturn the election results and have Congress ratify that change. It was kind of the strategy that Trump tried in 2020 but was unsuccessful. If there’s a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and Kevin McCarthy is called upon to accept fraudulent election results, I’m not sure what he would do.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger
R-Illinois
If [Trump] wins legitimately, in theory, that’s democracy in action. The thing that would be concerning to me is, obviously, last time he came in with not a real understanding of how government works and how to use it to your advantage, and now he does. He came in and hired non-loyalists, and now he will [hire loyalists]. But on the broader question of democracy, my biggest concern is … more about the second people lose faith in their vote. That’s when democracy fails. That’s the only thing that has to work—you have to know that you’re gonna vote and that your vote is going to count. And the outcome doesn’t matter for democracy. What matters is that you know that works. And that’s why I’m so angry at what Trump has done. He’s convinced half the country that democracy doesn’t work for them.
Sanford Levinson
Professor at the University of Texas School of Law
He will become president again because of the Electoral College. I don’t think that anybody seriously believes that he could win a national popular vote election, simply because he would lose by many millions of votes in California and New York for starters, and even if he would take all of the small states … he would still be losing by millions of votes. He won in 2016 only because of the Electoral College. He came close in 2020 only because of the Electoral College, and he would win in 2024 only because of the Electoral College…. The saving grace of Donald Trump is his incompetence. What we should really fear is a competent Trumpista, and there are some waiting in the wings who would cheer, at least privately, if Donald Trump died tomorrow…. A Republican ascendance would mean even fuller capture of the federal judiciary than there is now…. And so if you have a unified Republican government, then you have to be terrified at what legislation they would be able to pass.
Heather Cox Richardson
Historian and professor at Boston College
If Trump, or someone like him, wins election in 2024, I would expect to see the end of American democracy. If that sounds apocalyptic, it’s worth remembering that we have had just such a scenario in the United States before, in the American South between 1880 and 1965. In those decades, although there were always elections, state legislatures had rigged the electoral system so that white Democrats would always win. Essentially, the region was a one-party state that had abandoned the rule of law…. It was the realization that the United States had abandoned the rule of law that inspired lawmakers to protect democracy in the 1950s and the 1960s through a series of civil rights acts and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Now, by rolling those protections back, Republican-dominated legislatures are threatening to re-create that one-party system, but this time, the demographic skewing of our Electoral College means those states can install a president. The one-party system of the early–twentieth-century South will become national. I don’t think enough people realize how bad it will be.
Anthony Scaramucci
Former Trump White House communications director
To me, I think we are in the same state that we were in, frankly, in the late 1930s. But the bad guys have won a few rounds here. Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, the America First movement, and Joseph P. Kennedy—these sort of racist and radical fringe people didn’t win. Franklin Roosevelt won…. I mean Trump’s shortcomings, there are many, but one of them that’s glaring is that he’s very disorganized. The January 6 insurrection, they’ve got him dead to rights in terms of the criminal intent. He had direct criminal intent to overthrow the election and to blow up and rip up democracy. But he’s so woefully disorganized that he couldn’t get it done, he couldn’t pull it off. But what about next time? What if they’re more organized next time? What if they’ve figured out a way with all these voter restrictions to really curb the Black and brown people who want to vote? They tell them “well, too bad,” there’s one voting booth in your district for 10,000 people, and the whites can have one voting booth for every 600 people.
Michael Steele
Former Republican National Committee chairman
Well, first off, just to be clear, Donald Trump’s name shouldn’t be on a ballot for anything, period. And to an extent that it is and he should win, it would be cataclysmic. People need to fundamentally understand it’s not even a question of appreciating it anymore, you just know this as fact that if Donald Trump wins reelection, his four years would be consumed with revenge. His four years would be consumed with validating his lie. His four years would be consumed with retribution against those who, in his view, wronged him, and [he] would then corrupt the instruments of power in Washington, from Congress—because he’d have a compliant, complicit House and Senate Republicans who would do every bidding that he put in front of them—and then corrupt the various institutions that would be required to execute his revenge, which would include the Department of Justice, etc. So I think we just need to be clear about what this means. A megalomaniac operates from one position and one position only: himself.
Stuart Stevens
Republican consultant
I think it’ll be the last presidential race that we have that resembles anything in our lifetime. But I’m not really sure [of] the difference between Donald Trump and [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis. Some make the case that DeSantis would be worse, because he has all of Trump’s lack of any democratic principles, but he’s more slickly packaged, and probably smarter. All of this is an outgrowth of the complete collapse of the Republican Party. Our system’s designed so that major parties should be the circuit breaker, and Republicans never pull the circuit breaker.
Rep. Bennie Thompson
D-Mississippi
Given what I’ve seen so far with the [January 6] committee, and the fact that there was an absolute disregard for policy, procedures, rules, it will be an absolute travesty for this country. And the democracy that we’ve all come to love and appreciate would just be in shambles.
Mary L. Trump
Author of Too Much and Never Enough
In some ways, a second term will be much like his first term—a systematic attempt to undo the policy achievements of his predecessor. It is the differences between the first and the not-improbable second term that should concern us even more. Over the last six years, Republican leadership has been presented with many off-ramps away from Donald and taken none of them—there’s every reason to believe that Republicans in Congress will have moved even further to the right. If Donald regains the Oval Office, that would mean, once again, that the justice system failed to hold him accountable. This will embolden him to an unprecedented degree. And while Donald signs off on every authoritarian, anti-democratic policy the Republicans in Congress try to enact, he will focus on grievance and, above all, vengeance. If you think his first four years were bad, buckle up.
Maya Wiley
Incoming president of the Leadership Conference, civil rights lawyer, and MSNBC analyst
We know that Donald Trump told outright lies in his first term, spread and supported disinformation, and used the organs of government to feed his own interests. Extremism and hate became its own pandemic under Trump’s self-indulgent prodding. And authoritarian leaders find him a friendly ally. Why would we expect another four-year dose of the snake oil he peddles to be any less poisonous? I can only assume a reelection would make him even more deadly to our democracy.
Dan Froomkin says there’s no other way to see MSM behavior
I think he‘s right:
The obvious answer to the question in the headline is no. Reporters and editors at establishment news organizations are mostly reality-based, generally anti-totalitarian, quite fond of the First Amendment, reasonably tolerant — and almost without exception are not white supremacist Christian nationalists.
So I am quite certain that as a purely personal or political matter, the vast majority don’t support Donald Trump or his return to power.
But professionally?
Reading and watching how they cover Trump and the Republican Party, it’s getting harder and harder to make the case that the most influential people in our top newsrooms aren’t hankering for his return. What else explains their behavior?
Consider the evidence.
The leaders and top journalists from our major news organization do not seem alarmed.
They treat his official entry into the race as some combination of foregone conclusion and parlor game, rather than as a grave danger.
Trump-channeler Maggie Haberman declared in February 2021 that “Mr. Trump is serious at the moment about running for president a third time in 2024.” Jonathan Allen of NBC wrote in September: “The real question isn’t so much when he’ll start campaigning, but whether he will stop.” The Washington Post has chronicled “a string of thinly veiled hints about his political plans.”
After New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu acknowledged publicly what almost no other elected Republican will – that Trump is “fucking crazy” – Haberman tweeted huffily: “Trump is running, barring a significant change, and all the private laughing at him + lack of standing up to him by other Rs isn’t going to change that.”
They are eagerly awaiting his formal announcement.
When these reporters write about Trump these days, they generally pause to note the centrality of the Big Lie. But they don’t treat him as manifestly unfit for public office and a threat to American democracy. This is what I call the normalization of the profoundly abnormal.
So, for instance, when Shane Goldmacher and Haberman write about his control over the Republican Party, they’ll make note of “Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud” and explain how his lie has become “an article of faith, and even a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries.” But they don’t explain how disqualifying that should be.
Here’s how they present Trump’s downside:
Mr. Trump is also deeply divisive, unpopular among the broader electorate and under investigation for his business practices and his interference with election officials in Fulton County, Ga. He remains the same politician whose White House oversaw four years of devastating Republican losses, including of the House and Senate. And while a scattered few Republicans publicly warn about yoking the party to him, more fret in private about the consequences.
That would be a pretty tough contextualizing paragraph for any other presidential candidate. But for Trump? It’s euphemistic to the point of inaccuracy. This man is a provably hateful, vindictive, lying, cheating, stealing insurrectionist who inspires slavish devotion from a white nationalist base and sycophancy from craven Republican leaders. His even further accelerating authoritarian tendencies — combined with his party’s full-on assault on voting rights and refusal to honor election results – directly threaten key constitutional protections and rights that have defined this country since its founding. It couldn’t be more clear that in a second term, he would ignore even the few rules he adhered to last time. The federal bureaucracy would be purged of expertise and competence, all of government would be turned to serve his whims and fortunes. To the extent that the U.S. remains the leader of the free world, it would cease to be.
This is not hard to support with evidence. Just in the past few weeks, the man who tried to steal an election said his only regret is that he didn’t personally set siege to the Capitol.
I suspect that reporters and editors at our leading news organizations assume that most readers already realize how dangerously unhinged Trump is — and that readers who don’t accept that will be turned off if reporters are blunt about it.
But it has to be said. It can’t just be assumed.
Not saying is enabling. So why don’t they say it?
You can read the rest at the link in which he provides ample evidence for the following:
They still crave access to Trump and still don’t confront him when they get it.
They can’t seem to keep in mind for more than a few hours what their investigative reporter colleagues – or they themselves — have dug up.
This one is especially infuriating. He offers up a number of examples, but this one is really galling considering the right’s relentless flogging of the “Hunter Biden laptop” story:
Every few days, some fantastic, grotesque, fatal-to-anyone-but-Trump “holy shit” news item comes out about something Trump has done.
Investigative reporters have been doing amazing work. Just last week, the New York Times ran a jaw-dropper by David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman paying off Jared Kushner to the tune of a $2 billion investment fund.
And needless to say the ongoing revelations about the attempted coup should make Trump a total pariah. But the press reports on them like they are the weather. Here today, gone tomorrow.
And more:
They’re constantly assuring us that Republicans really aren’t that extremist.
They express great admiration for winning Republican tactics.
Covering a rational president is so much less rewarding.
As he points out:
For White House reporters in particular, covering Trump was exhilarating and easy.
Trump would say something crazy, they would write it down, they’d stick in a paragraph way down about how “Democrats disagree,” their stories would led their newscasts, websites and front pages, and they became TV stars talking about it.
Over and over again.
The Biden White House is normal, filled with people doing the real work of government and it’s boring for them. So:
To make things exciting, they trot out GOP talking points and push for kinetic violence. They ignore the good news for Joe Biden, and focus almost exclusively on the bad. (No one made that case better than the late Eric Boehlert, whose humanity and voice are sorely missed.)
The result is a voting public that thinks the booming economy is a disaster and wants to put a “check” on Biden by putting Republicans back in power.
As I wrote a few weeks back, “When the public thinks up is down, it’s time to rethink coverage“. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan said the same thing the other day.
So what else could it be, besides wanting Trump to win?
One of the first pieces I wrote upon launching Press Watch was: “It would be insane for America to re-elect Trump. Why can’t journalists say that?”
I still don’t really understand why not.
I can think of a variety of explanations other than that the media wants Trump to win.
One is the media business’s hankering for a close race. Close races are good for journalism, from both a coverage and revenue standpoint. (Then again, most political reporters have already glibly declared that the Republicans will win big in the 2022 congressional elections. That one’s case closed, as far as they’re concerned.)
Political reporters are also suckers for spectacle and drama and conflict, so maybe they’re drawn to Trump like they’re drawn to a train wreck, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually rooting for him.
And the easiest thing for a political reporter to do is split the difference between both parties. They substitute triangulation for analysis. With the Republican Party having gone to such an extreme, even the “middle ground” is effectively right wing.
Or it could just be a coincidence that so many of the failings of modern political journalism end up mimicking a preference for chaos.
One thing we know for sure is that Trump was very good for the news industry’s bottom lines. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38 percent at CNN, 34 percent at Fox News and 25 percent at MSNBC, according to Nielsen. The number of unique visitors to Politico dropped by nearly 50 percent between October 2020 and 2021, according to Comscore. For the Washington Post, it was a 28 percent decline; for the New York Times, 15 percent.
As the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote just a few months into the Biden presidency, “Trump predicted news ratings would ‘tank if I’m not there.’ He wasn’t wrong.”
By comparison, news executives were giddy about Trump, right from the get-to. In 2015, CBS’s then-CEO Les Moonves famously said of the Trump circus that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.” He added: ” Go Donald! Keep getting out there!”
(I’m leaving the issue of media ownership for another time. All the major broadcast networks and cable networks are owned by huge conglomerates, and the Washington Post is owned by the richest man in the world.)
I suspect it’s cowardice, rather than avarice. They’re afraid that if they sound the alarm, they’ll be written off as biased and untrustworthy. (Surprise! They already are!) And on a personal basis, they don’t want to have to admit that they were wrong for so long, and should have sounded the alarm ages ago. (And not just about Trump, mind you.)
But regardless of their egos, ringing that alarm even this late is a moral imperative.
Maybe one of them will crack, and the others will follow. Or maybe not.
Are there telltale signs of change? I don’t see any.
So no, I don’t think the mainstream media really wants Trump to win again. But I have a hard time explaining its behavior in any other way.
There is no other explanation. It’s an emotional thing, not a rational thing. Biden is boring and covering his government is hard work. Trump was like watching a sporting event (or a circus.) It was fun. They want that back, even if they can’t admit it to themselves.