Hope: Thursday Roundup for 12-5-24
Some of the most insightful information Public Enlightenment saw this week.
For the next two weeks I’m going to continue messaging about the PRESS Act. Let’s fight the forces of fascism at our doorstep. Call your senators right now and tell them to pass the PRESS Act.
Media writer Jennifer Schulze’s piece for Heartland Signal from two weeks ago, “Trump 2.0 requires fearless news reporting, not social calls to Mar-a-Lago” is full of great outlets that provide quality, fact-based information.
Other fearless outlets you should consider reading and supporting include the States Newsroom outlets, The New Republic — including the frequent podcasts by reporter Greg Sargent — Slate — especially courts and law coverage by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern — Inside Climate News, Bolts, The Philadelphia Inquirer — including Will Bunch’s do-not-miss columns — Courier Newsroom, Capital B News and The 19th News.
Get in there, root around, find a new outlet to follow, become a more informed human.
I’m pretty loathe to recommend paywalled content, but I think you should be paying for Parker Molloy’s work (if you can) so I might as well offer you a teaser. I agree with Molloy in her piece, “The Platform Is the Problem: Why Staying on X Won't Work.”
As Brian Beutler points out in his recent Off Message newsletter, mainstream journalists and political operatives keep treating X as though it's just another communication platform, ignoring how thoroughly Musk has weaponized it for partisan purposes. The Washington Post reported in October that X "has secretly throttled traffic" to various news sites Musk dislikes, while simultaneously boosting his own posts. This isn't mere editorial bias—it's systematically manipulating what users see and engage with.
Twitter is a hellscape of disinformation. There is no guarantee that the account you are arguing with, the one in the replies that is either aping right-wing disinformation or blaming the world’s problems on women, is even a real person. Best to head to Bluesky where you can use lists to block disinformation accounts.
I wanted to write about billionaire Marc Andreessen’s insane performance last week on the Joe Rogan Podcast because it dovetails very nicely with the first episode of my podcast, Tricked, about the 60 year project of ultra-conservative billionaires to warp our society in their favor. Billionaire media manipulation to induce the public into acting against its best interests is a tale as old as time. And we keep falling for it. Nathan J. Robinson worked Andreessen’s lying about the CFPB into his piece, “Billionaires Are Lying Shamelessly to Convince Us To Destroy Our Government.”
What does the CFPB do? It investigates companies that have engaged in deceptive, abusive, and unfair practices, ensuring they treat their customers fairly. What kinds of practices? Well, have a look at their website, where they list all of their enforcement actions. CFPB victories include getting banks to get rid of or reduce overdraft fees, and pursuing Wells Fargo for “misapplied payments, wrongful foreclosures, and incorrect fees and interest charges,” resulting in billions of dollars being returned to customers. The associate director of the National Consumer Law Center has said that the CFP “has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace. Overall it has had a tremendous impact on making it more fair and transparent.”
This is the work that Andreessen calls “terrorizing” financial institutions. Why does Andreessen think that making sure companies don’t deceive their customers is “terrorizing” them? Well, because certain members of the ruling class think that any kind of regulation of their conduct is a form of oppression.
As for DOGE, it would be great if profit-seeking mainstream media could help the public out by regularly repeating the reality that Musk and Ramaswamy want to destroy federal departments in order to privatize government function and shower themselves and their friends with lucrative contracts in an act of corruption unparalleled in US history. But they can barely report on Ramaswamy without whitewashing his multiple pharmaceutical scams (by the way, this is a hyperlink to Newsweek and you should know that it is now a right wing outlet).
I spoke with a friend this week who described his overwhelming anxiety about our uncertain future. Of course, the right move is to just Brené Brown the situation:
And I have no “at least” to offer here, as in at least we might still have a democracy when this is over or at least there will be another baseball season to look forward to (Go O’s!). But I did come across this piece that I want to share with him and you. It’s from a guy I don’t know, Neil Abrams. Neil is a political scientist and futures trader. Without looking that up I’ll assume that means he used a time traveling DeLorean to provide his past-self with a sports almanac and now wins big by betting on things like the Tyson-Paul fight.
Neil’s piece is called “Trump Can Be Stopped.”
Civil society is a term political scientists use to describe the various groups that represent citizens in relation to the state. They include labor unions, interest groups, religious organizations, professional associations, social movements, political parties, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Successful authoritarians, from Chávez to Orbán, were able to marginalize civil society through a mix of controlled repression and co-optation. Others, like Yanukovych, responded with disproportionate violence and ended up mobilizing civil society against them.
Trump will likely do the same—only the civil society he is up against is far more formidable than anything Yanukovych encountered. As a consequence, he may find himself in a very dangerous position.
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Here’s to healthier information,
Brian
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Called both my Senators AGAIN, today!