Shocking But Not Surprising Strikes Again (and Again)
The Caprices of the Oligarchs
Shocking but not surprising is a phrase I've often reverted to in the past eight years, for things that are both hideous and predictable, maybe transgressive against the old order but everyday under Trump. These days, shocking but not surprising is everywhere. I ran into some Sunday night, when something lured me over to the Bad Place--that's how I think of what Twitter's become, as it's also become the personal fiefdom of Lord Elon of Musk, where he rewards and punishes, censors and promotes, ravenously laps up flattery and does official business for the United States of America, and where right-wing rage and misinformation are always seething and swarming. It's a hell where facts instead of bodies are tortured.
Anyway, what led me there was a bizarre transaction showing how it works in what's sometimes called neo-feudalism, the political-economic system Silicon Valley is sometimes said to be pursuing by creating corporations and oligarchs with the power – and intent – to override democracy and the will of the people. It started when Jon Favreau, the Pod Save America guy and former Obama speechwriter, tweeted that "kids will die because Elon Musk starved them of food we've already paid for."
He was commenting on a CNN story that reported on February 27th, "MANA Nutrition makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that many humanitarian aid workers are familiar with. It is fortified with milk and essential vitamins, packed with calories and sent to severely malnourished children around the world, including some countries in Africa. On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Moore, the CEO and co-founder of the Fitzgerald, Georgia-based plant, got word from the US Agency for International Development: MANA’s contracts with the agency were being canceled. CNN spoke with Moore just minutes after he said he received a series of contract termination letters from USAID."
This prompted Musk to lash out at Favreau with the kind of juvenile insult he specializes in and claim, falsely, that the aid had been restored (which was at least an admission it had been cancelled). But it hadn't been restored, and Musk was lying when he said it had and lying when he called Favreau a liar.
After – and only after – the Elon outburst, it actually was restored. CNN's follow-up report declares, "The CEO of a plant in Georgia that makes a special peanut butter paste for severely malnourished children around the world told CNN that his company’s contracts with the US Agency for International Development that had been abruptly canceled last week were all reinstated late Sunday night. Mark Moore, the founder MANA Nutrition, shared screenshots of the rescinded contract termination notifications with CNN on Sunday." In other words the guy who's lounging around on Formerly Known as Twitter picking fights and spreading lies also had a direct line to restore a contract to supply food to starving children in other parts of the world. That whether these faraway children live or die relies on the whims and wandering attention span of such a spectacularly vicious clown is shocking. But not surprising.
The same applies to the larger picture of how DOGE hacked away most of USAID. Wired reports from a human rights conference, "Several digital and human rights organizations who spoke to WIRED in Taipei—most on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration or their own governments—say the cuts have undermined years of global democracy-building and free speech initiatives and put the lives and livelihoods of their staff around the world at risk."
The Failures of the Fourth Estate
The CNN report on MANA didn't say much about how and why the food aid had been restored, denying readers a chance to understand the nightmarish capriciousness of the destruction underway. This kind of tasteful avoidance of the facts, when the facts are outrageous or lurid or despicable or involve the petty nastiness of the personalities involved, has plagued mainstream media since Trump came down that golden elevator. I can only presume that the people at the top of these corporations are more intent on producing a consumer product that resembles traditional news, with equal treatment of both sides, never mind if one side is (alas, too often too languidly) defending democracy and the rule of law and one is breaking the law to hasten the march toward authoritarianism.
The truth is outrageous and indecorous and therefore has to be sanded down to fit their frameworks (and the truth told baldly outs the outrages of the oligarchy, which is another reason why these stories so often tiptoe when they should kick against the pricks). They also have a commitment to making personal conflicts seem exciting and more important than they often are, because they think we're stupid and shallow and want clickbait gossip, while also making the actual administration of government as in the stuff that affects our lives, our rights, our world, and our planet seem more boringly bureaucratic and irrelevant than they are. Further, the version of objectivity or neutrality they subscribe to means avoiding tracing a pattern, instead thinning out or leaving out altogether the context that gives meaning to a story.
Take another thing going on right now that will sacrifice children's lives as surely as denying that food aid: the termination of US support for Ukraine as it struggles for its existence against Russia's brutal invasion. Even the Guardian ran a headline Monday night declaring "US has suspended all military aid to Ukraine, White House official says, in wake of Trump-Zelenskyy row," which might make you think that somehow, until Friday afternoon's obscene confrontation, Trump wasn't going to suspend all military aid. But that's almost certainly backward: the drama with a hostile and rude Trump and Vance (and an apparently taxidermized Marco Rubio, though he may have just bloated up from having to eat so many lies) was staged to justify what was always going to happen.
Because despite his own royal ambitions, Trump is a groveling vassal to Vladimir Putin and has been since he entered politics. That's the only sensible interpretation when you connect all the dots. It's clear that Putin has some sort of hold over him that manifests as Trump's desire to please and obey and benefit the Russian regime (even though no one knows quite what that hold is--blackmail? Manchurian candidate brainwashing? daddy issues? thermonuclear flattery?). He spoke of Putin as though they were a team when he yelled at Zelensky in that grotesque White House event, "Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia ... You ever hear of that deal?" I did, and it wasn't phony.
The abandonment of Ukraine and of US cybersecurity against Russia constitutes a surrender and behavior that was entirely predictable from Trump, who seems to have been recruited by Russia long ago, and whose presidential campaigns have all been aided by the Putin regime, most decisively in 2016. The Wall Street Journal editorial board did better than most when they titled their commentary "Putin Wins the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office Debacle."
If there was a Pulitzer prize for normalization, it would routinely go to the New York Times, which just published a piece that seems to be full of naive wonder about our newest surrender to Russia: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive operations against Russia, according to a current official and two former officials briefed on the secret instructions. The move is apparently part of a broader effort to draw President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into talks on Ukraine and a new relationship with the United States." What exactly is that relationship?
All signs suggest submission on the part of the President of the US, against our own immediate interests and in abandonment of alliances that have lasted decades to centuries, with jettison of the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The abandonment of cybersecurity missions seems like a surrender of sorts, and the Guardian confirms that in its report citing an anonymous source who declared: "analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency." Welcome to shocking but not surprising. And to so many failures to connect so many dots.
The Hollowness of the Royal Decrees
Speaking of the Constitution there's another problem with how the news gets covered. Trump is attempting to exercise powers he does not have and to do many things that break the law. If, for example, Trump says nobody is allowed to dance, on penalty of death, he has no legal power to make that declaration and no power to enforce it, but if everyone stops dancing it's as good as if he did. Reporting as though Trump has these powers helps give him those powers. While dozens lawsuits are pushing back on some of that power grab with some success, the first round of pushbacks should come as announcements from all of us – in Congress, in the press, in state government, in protests and other assertions from the public – that these orders are illegal and therefore without teeth and should be ignored and not obeyed.
For Trump, executive orders and tweets on his pal Elon's platform or his own Truth Social are practically indistinguishable, and one of his most recent tweets threatens universities and the First Amendment and a few other things. He may just move on and forget about it, as he does with many threats and promises, but the point is to make the threat and get people (or in this case universities) to respond as though it will be carried out – to respond by censoring and repressing their students. To shrink the space of freedom down without the administration having to do the hard work of making us do it. Don't buy it. Don't do it. Our noncompliance is our power.
We live in an outrageous time in a nation under attack from within. The administrative state is being destroyed before our eyes, laws broken, lives broken, alliances broken. Too many people with the power to tell the truth in ways that matter are waffling, watering it down, normalizing, sane-washing, bringing squirt guns to the firestorm, or just (hey campaign 2024 celebrities! where did you all go?) sitting it out, while the oligarchs who own the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are outright selling out.
We are in this crisis in no small part because of misinformation and disinformation, and some of it came from Putin's troll farms (aka a cyberwar in which we've apparently just surrendered), and some of it came from the manipulation of information on Twitter and Facebook and Google, and some of it came from right-wing media. But too much of it also came from mainstream media turning dangers and crimes into something bland and unthreatening. Or just ignoring them. Or carefully disconnecting the dots. We are undergoing a coup, and the people raising the alarm are not alarmists.
The press is treating each piece of destruction of this country as an interesting separate matter--take for example, Trump's weekend proposal of a "cryptocurrency strategic reserve." The mainstream press explained it as though it wasn't a giant heist scheme and maybe kickback for the cryptocurrency industry's lavish support of Trump and Republican candidates in 2024. "Trump names cryptocurrencies in strategic reserve, sending prices up" blandly observes the Reuters headline when we need headlines like the new online magazine Zeteo's "Trump’s 'Crypto Reserve' Is Such Brazen Corruption." Or to take a more recent example since Sunday was a century ago, here's the Bulwark, saying of last night's State of the Union address what a genteel newspaper never would: "Trump’s Unhinged And Lie Soaked Congress Address Was Insane For Even Him."
We need stories that connect all the pieces, all the damage being done, and all the profits being siphoned off that damage. We need background stories to explain how life for most people in this country got so much harder over the past half century, how Reaganomics and the rest rebuilt the gilded age of plutocrats and a an ever-larger desperate underclass by dismantling the relative economic ease and equality created by the the New Deal, relatively fair taxation, and the rest, and how Trump and Musk and the other oligarchs want to take it all much farther. We need journalism that treats the climate crisis as literally bigger in every possible way than anything else. Too many people in this country don't have real and reliable pictures of what's going on, what's important, how the antics in the capital will affect their lives, what powers they hold, who is actually looking out for them and who's out to crush them.
I think this work is being done, and done heroically, but in smaller publications that don't reach enough people. Right now Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and Wired are among the magazines providing unsparingly strong coverage. And a whole lot of journalists have gone independent with newsletters like this one (Heather Cox Richardson's astonishing success – she is said to have 1.7 million subscribers and more who follow her on Facebook – bespeaks an appetite for the opposite of clickbait – for thoughtful, historically contextualized summaries of the news with no pretense of being nonpartisan.) While it's popular to decry getting your news from social media, you can follow some of the country's strongest voices and most expert opinions if you choose your feed carefully – constitutional law scholars, economists, scientists, historians, and elected officials are all there speaking their minds and citing their sources. The truth is out there, but not everyone has the time, skill, and resources to hunt and gather it. Among the main reasons we are in this crisis is the information crisis. The state of mainstream journalism is shocking but not surprising.
p.s. There is a lot happening right now in opposition to the regime. Here's a great list of those things from Jessica Craven and her Chop Wood Carry Water newsletter.
Here's a fantastic conversation on video about what's happening and what they and we can do about it, with Congressional Democrats Jamie Raskin and Melanie Stansbury and with Rob Shriver, the outgoing Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management who's just joined Democracy Forward’s senior staff, hosted by Women Forward.
Some wonderful people I work with have started the Resist List on BlueSky and Instagram. Here's the BlueSky link:
