David Brooks. 2022 LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin.
Today is going to be a big grading day. But before I get started, I want to share with you a remarkable column by David Brooks of The New York Times (gift link) as well as a couple of eye-opening statements from the political right.
Moderate in his politics, deeply conservative by nature, Brooks is a longstanding anti-Trumper, but he leans toward the rhetorical rather than advocating any sort of specific action beyond voting. Now, though, he’s calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” and closes by alluding to Karl Marx: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” He writes:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault.
Earlier this week, another prominent anti-Trump conservative, Bill Kristol, posted a photo on Bluesky of ICE thugs detaining Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and wrote: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?”
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the last remaining moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke frankly about the fear that she and other members of her party feel about what might happen to them if they speak out against Trump. Just to say that out loud is an important step, although of course it needs to be followed by action. At a public forum she said:
We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.
I don’t want to get carried away. Over the past decade, there has been no group less influential and consequential than the tiny band of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives. But we may be starting to see the stirrings of — well, of something.
By ruling in favor of The Associated Press in its lawsuit to overturn a ban imposed by the Trump White House, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden applied the First Amendment in a straightforward, entirely predictable manner. The Trump administration may appeal, but it would be shocking and deeply disturbing if McFadden’s decision isn’t upheld.
First, McFadden ruled that though the White House can exercise broad discretion in terms of which news organizations are allowed access to the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago and other venues, it must do so in a neutral manner. The White House, by explicitly stating that the AP was being banned for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its proper name rather than the “Gulf of America,” was engaging in unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden wrote. He continued:
The analysis is straightforward. The AP made an editorial decision to continue using “Gulf of Mexico” in its Stylebook. The Government responded publicly with displeasure and explicitly announced it was curtailing the AP’s access to the Oval Office, press pool events, and East Room activities. If there is a benign explanation for the Government’s decision, it has not been presented here.
The judge also rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the AP was seeking special privileges. First Amendment precedent holds that a news organization has no right to demand, say, an interview with a public official, or to be called on at a news conference. The White House claimed that’s what the AP was seeking.
You may have heard that less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal government. That figure is sometimes bandied about by those who wonder why the news organization doesn’t just cut the cord and end the debate over taxpayer-funded news. The problem is that it’s more complicated than that.
In today’s New York Times morning newsletter, media reporter Benjamin Mullin explains the reality. Public radio stations in general are highly dependent on funding from the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and those member stations pay a lot for NPR programming.
In rural areas, in particular, public radio is a primary source of news when there is an emergency such as a tornado or flooding. And many of those stations would not survive a cutoff in government funding. Mullin writes:
NPR can weather the funding cut, … thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.
Or as former CPB board member Howard Husock has put it: “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”
My ethics and diversity class on Wednesday was devoted to a brief overview of First Amendment law. The class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads, and they have shown throughout the semester that they are engaged and compassionate young people.
I began with a video in the news. You’ve probably seen it. It shows black-clad, masked thugs, apparently with ICE, approaching a young woman on a sidewalk at Tufts University, hauling her off to a van and driving her away. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk, and she’s a Ph.D. student and a Turkish citizen who’s in the U.S. on a student visa.
It’s the latest shocking image in a series of shocking images we’ve been subjected to recently as the Trump administration — my friend Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has simply taken to calling it “the regime” — tracks down international students who have been involved in some form of pro-Palestinian activism and targets them for deportation.
The only activity I have seen attributed to Ozturk that might have led to her being targeted is an op-ed she helped write calling on the university to recognize Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” and to divest from Israel. You may agree or disagree; I mostly disagree, though I am appalled by the brutal manner in which Israel’s Netanyahu government has pursued its war against the terrorists of Oct. 7, 2023. But the First Amendment gives Ozturk an absolute right to speak and write freely, regardless of whether she’s a citizen.
According to accounts in The Tufts Daily student newspaper and Cambridge Day, thousands of protesters gathered in Somerville Wednesday night to show their support for Ozturk.
Cambridge Day reporter Jodi Hilton quoted Asli Memisoglu, a native of Turkey who graduated from Tufts in 1987, as saying: “One thing I’ve always cherished was the sanctity of free speech, but that’s threatened now.”
In The Tufts Daily, Emily Isaac, a Somerville resident, said: “People are always going to fight back. Everyone likes to say what they would have done during a historical atrocity, or during times of fascism, and I think it’s important to recognize the signs of when it’s happening.”
I wish I could say that Isaac was overstating matters.
Since Trump began his second term on Jan. 21, authoritarianism has descended upon us swiftly and mercilessly. Universities, law firms and public media organizations have all been targeted, and the people who are running them don’t know whether they should fight, surrender or find some sort of middle ground. Immigrants are whisked off to hellish prisons in El Salvador on the flimsiest of pretexes. Our country is quickly becoming unrecognizable.
On Threads last night, I saw a comment from someone who is definitely not a Trumper that, well, this is what people voted for. My response: Democracy without protection for individual rights is just another word for dictatorship.
We are in very bad shape, and the courts can only do so much.
To make the humiliation complete, Donald Trump has apparently lied about the agreement he reached with Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, in order to cast the terms of surrender as being even worse than they actually were.
According to a four-byline article in The New York Times (gift link), Trump’s claim that Paul Weiss had agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion program appears to be false. So, too, is Trump’s assertion that the firm had admitted to “wrongdoing” on the part of former Paul Weiss lawyer Mark Pomerantz, who had worked for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial — you know, the one in which Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, a verdict that still stands.
The Times reports:
The copy of the agreement that Mr. Karp shared with Paul Weiss differed in some ways from Mr. Trump’s characterization of the deal in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Although Mr. Trump said the law firm had specifically agreed to not follow any diversity, equity and inclusion policies in its hiring practices, there is no reference to D.E.I. in the agreement that Mr. Karp shared. Mr. Trump has mounted an aggressive campaign against diversity initiatives in the federal government, labeling it as a form of workplace discrimination.
There also was no mention of Mr. Pomerantz, the former Paul Weiss partner, in the copy of the agreement circulated by Mr. Karp. Five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.
In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.
Karp deserves no sympathy. It was bad enough that he was willing to cut a deal with the extortionist-in-chief rather than stand strong. It’s just interesting that Trump would succeed in this corrupt scheme and then decide that it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t resist the urge to pile on false details that made Karp and his firm look even worse.
Standing Rock protest in St. Paul, Minn. Photo (cc) 2016 by Fibonacci Blue.
Earlier this week, a North Dakota jury delivered a verdict on behalf of a large energy company that may destroy the environmental organization Greenpeace — and that could inflict significant damage on the First Amendment as well.
According to reporters Jeff Brady and Alejandra Borunda of NPR, the jury ruled in favor of Energy Transfer, which built the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and which accused Greenpeace in a civil suit of libel, trespassing and other offenses. The jury awarded Energy Transfer $660 million, which Greenpeace officials have said could force the organization to cease operations.
William Harlan Hale delivering the first Voice of America Broadcast on Jan. 1, 1942. Photo via Wikipedia.
When a coup takes place in other countries, we sometimes learn that news programming is taken off the air and replaced with patriotic music. I don’t know what kind of music has been playing on Voice of America since Saturday morning. What I do know is that dictators like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping found it pleasing to their ears.
There is a danger at moments like this to breeze past stories such as the virtual shutdown of Voice of America because we knew it was coming anyway, and because there are more immediate matters with which to grapple, including illegal arrests and deportations. But the Trump White House’s shutdown of Voice of America, though not surprising, is nevertheless a moment worth paying careful attention to as the authoritarian regime headed by Donald Trump tightens its grip.
The 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague. Rosika Schwimmer is fourth from left. Photo via Wikipedia.
What is the First Amendment for? Quite simply, it is for protecting our right to express views that are unpopular or even offensive. There’s more to it than that, of course, and it’s not unlimited. But it surely is there to act as a shield for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs have arrested and who the administration is now trying to deport to — well, somewhere.
Khalil was involved pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University last spring. As Philip Marcelo of The Associated Press reports, “The White House … claimed Khalil organized protests where pro-Hamas propaganda was distributed.” But Khalil also holds a green card, making him a permanent resident of the United States. Moreover, the First Amendment extends to anyone in the U.S., citizen or non-citizen, legal resident or undocumented immigrant.
Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had a few things to say about another non-U.S. citizen with unpopular views. Rosika Schwimmer was a Hungarian immigrant, feminist and pacifist who sought to become a U.S. citizen. She was turned down because she refused to take the oath of citizenship, believing that it obliged her to take up arms if ordered to do so — notwithstanding the reality that, as a woman, she would have been exempt from military service.
Her case ended up before the Supreme Court, which, in 1929, on a 6-3 vote, overturned an appeals court ruling in her favor. Justice Holmes wrote an eloquent dissent that is still invoked as a defense of the First Amendment’s true meaning. He said in part:
Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but, if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate. I think that we should adhere to that principle with regard to admission into, as well as to life within, this country.
“Freedom for the thought that we hate” is a concise and compelling explanation of why the First Amendment matters, and it’s a phrase that we’ve all heard over and over again. Anthony Lewis even made it the title of one of his books.
And it’s why Trump is acting illegally and unconstitutionally in holding Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. He has not been accused of providing material assistance to Hamas. Rather, he is being singled out for his political views. And let’s be honest — Trump is doing this in a deliberate attempt to rekindle left-wing activism on behalf of the Palestinians in order to harm Democrats, universities and anyone else who stands in the way of his authoritarian project.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called Khalil’s arrest the most significant threat to free speech since the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. “If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration,” she wrote. And indeed, Trump has boasted that more arrests will follow.
Schwimmer, at least, was allowed to remain in the U.S. as a non-citizen. She eventually moved to New York City and died in 1948. Khalil’s fate has yet to be determined.
Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.
1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”
Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.
Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.
She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”
2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.
“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.
Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.
3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.
“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”
As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”
Illustration based on a photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore
Today I’m using my gift links to share two important stories from The New York Times. Amid the torrent of news about Donald Trump, I think these two articles rise above the din and underscore the menace he represents both to our democracy and to world peace.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
He [Trump] told Mr. Trudeau [Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada] that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.
The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.
Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.
Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”
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