Following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday, non-MAGA commentators who have felt compelled to weigh in have struggled to find the right balance between expressing their loathing for what Kirk stood for without making it seem like they were celebrating his death.
Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Indeed, she wrote about her inclusion on Kirk’s Professor Watchlist shortly after it was established in 2016, saying, “I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it, people like the youngster who wrote this list.” She closed with this: “No, I will not shut up. America is still worth fighting for.”
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.
I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.
One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.
Note: If you’re wondering why this post seems to lack any context, it’s because I wrote it for my opinion journalism students. It’s an example of a blog post I want them to write when they do a presentation on an opinion journalist whose work they think is worth sharing with our class.
Heather Cox Richardson is an unlikely person to have emerged as a star of independent opinion journalism. A historian of 19th-century America at Boston College, she began writing her newsletter, “Letters from an American,” in 2019, during the run-up to Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Her efforts caught on quickly. A year later, according to a profile in The New York Times, she had amassed such a large audience that she was earning about $1 million a year from subscribers who were willing to pay $5 a month for access to her comments section and for her occasional “History Extra” feature. She currently has 1.8 million free and paid subscribers.
Richardson uses Substack as her platform and has stuck with it despite complaints that the service has refused to crack down on neo-Nazi content. Unlike some celebrity Substackers who were staked to a share of the venture capital the company has been able to raise, Richardson built her presence organically. After all, she was virtually unknown when she first began writing.
Richardson’s hallmark is a daily essay, running 1,000 to 1,200 words and placing the political news of the day in historical context. She does this five or six days a week, and usually fills in the other days with a photo. Her emails generally land at 2 or 3 a.m., which may speak to her diligence, although it’s possible that she’s scheduled them for automatic delivery. According to her biography, she has co-hosted other podcasts in the past, but I don’t believe that’s the case any longer.
A liberal whose new-found prominence landed her a half-hour video interview with President Biden in early 2022 (something he rarely granted to professional journalists), Richardson nevertheless presents her views calmly but firmly. Here are three essays that are worth taking note of:
• After the Justice Department released former special counsel Jack Smith’s report earlier this week finding that Donald Trump would likely have been found guilty for his role in the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, Richardson wrote: “While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies.”
• Following Kamala Harris’ defeat at Trump’s hands in November, Richardson did not hold back, calling Trump “a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions” who “refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020.”
• Reaching into the past, Richardson expressed the hopeful view that Trump was finished on Jan. 7, 2021, beginning, “The tide has turned against Trump and his congressional supporters, and they are scrambling.” Her essay represented the consensus view at the time, although in hindsight she showed that she — and all of us — could not foresee what was to come.
Richardson also posts an audio version of her newsletter on Substack and as a podcast. I haven’t listened, but at 12 to 15 minutes that’s just enough time for a longish walk to the train station. It’s also ideal for people with visual impairments.
With social media fracturing, it’s worth noting that you can follow her on Bluesky at @hcrichardson.bsky.social and on Threads at @heathercoxrichardson. For what it’s worth, she remains on Twitter/X as well, and you can find her there at @HC_Richardson.
Of course, as a self-respecting historian she also writes books. I’ve listened to the audio version of her 2023 book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America,” which is dedicated to engendering some optimism during the dark time we’re living through. Bonus: Richardson narrates it herself. I wrote a short review here.
As much as I appreciate what Richardson is doing, I think it is intended mainly for well-educated liberals who do not have the time to immerse themselves in the political news of the day and who want to catch up with something more substantive than MSNBC. My business is to follow the news, so I often find that her daily essays repeat what I already know. Still, she is performing a real service, and it’s not surprising that she has amassed such a large and loyal audience.
President Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Photo via the Biden White House.
I found President Biden’s address Wednesday night to be sad and moving. His theme was democracy and how we can preserve it. His 2020 victory over Donald Trump saved us from authoritarianism to an extent that no one realized when they cast their ballots. After all, it was only afterwards that Trump launched his effort to steal the election by any means necessary, including fomenting violence in the halls of Congress.
Biden proved not to be up to the challenge of defeating Trump again. Fortunately, by stepping aside and handing off his campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris, he has energized the anti-Trump movement and given it a chance of prevailing this November, though there are no guarantees.
There was nothing in Biden’s 11-minute Oval Office speech that would make anyone doubt the wisdom of his decision to end his re-election campaign. His voice was hoarse and halting, and before you blame COVID, keep in mind that this is the Biden we have come to know in recent months. Louise Aronson, a gerontologist who was one of the formerly anonymous physicians interviewed by The New Yorker last week, observed for The Atlantic (free link) that “his voice was weak, he stumbled occasionally over his prepared remarks, and his physical presence was diminished from what it once was.” She added:
Part of what was so excruciating about watching Biden hold on to his hope of winning a second term was seeing someone struggle to accept that their best-case scenario might be impossible. Variations of this situation play out daily in clinics and hospitals, and if you have a shred of empathy, it’s always heartbreaking. Yet few such difficult conversations — or the loud silences that too often take the place of these conversations — happen so publicly. Watching this one reminded me how unwelcome they are in American life, even in the offices of physicians delivering bad news.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has a thorough overview of Biden’s address, writing that he joins George Washington in his willingness to walk away and John Adams in presiding over a peaceful transition. “Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy,” Richardson said. “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.”
And I’m sorry, but I have to single out Peter Baker of The New York Times for a particularly sour “news analysis” (I’m not wasting a gift link on it). Here’s an excerpt that is very much in keeping with the rest of what he wrote:
What there was not much of was introspection about how he had gotten to this moment of indignity. He may be focused on the soul of America, but he revealed little of his own. Indeed, if there has been much soul searching over these past days and weeks of personal and political trauma that led to this reluctant end of his storied half-century political career, the search has been called off. Or at least the results were not reported.
I don’t think Baker would have been satisfied unless Biden confessed he was becoming senile and thanked the Times for pointing it out. Baker takes an enormous amount of grief from liberal readers for his resolute both-sides-ism, and I often find the criticism to be overwrought. This time, though, any brickbats directed his way are well deserved.
Wednesday’s address was not a farewell for Biden. After all, he’ll be president until next January, and I’m sure he’ll be out on the campaign trail with Harris. Still, it marked the latest in a series of closing acts for the president beginning with his Sunday announcement. We are going to miss this good and decent man.
Like no doubt many of you, I am horrified by the Supreme Court’s decision in the presidential immunity case but have little to offer beyond what you’re reading and seeing elsewhere. Nor did I feel reassured when President Biden came out and read a five-minute speech. Here’s part of what the historian Heather Cox Richardson had to say in a truly chilling essay for her newsletter, “Letters from an American”:
This is a profound change to our fundamental law — an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
It seems to me that if we’re going to save the country, it’s absolutely essential that a Democrat be elected to the White House this fall, whether it’s Biden or someone else, and that the Democrats take both branches of Congress as well. That’s a tall, unlikely order. And I’m sorry to have to be so partisan, but Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney are not walking through that door.
After that, we can talk about what needs to be done about the court, which has long since sunk into illegitimacy thanks to the machinations of Mitch McDonnell and the corruption of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. I’ve seen an upsurge in commentary that the court should be expanded, but that strikes me as a fool’s game — something that could easily be gamed by both parties until we’re up to a 57-member SCOTUS. Instead, I’d like to see term limits that guarantee every president will get one or two appointments plus constraints on the court’s powers, which at the moment appear to be limitless.
Substack, the newsletter and blogging platform that got so much attention a few years ago, is in a world of trouble. Casey Newton is taking his Platformer newsletter about social media and tech to a nonprofit, open-source self-publishing service called Ghost after he says his efforts to persuade Substack to pull pro-Nazi content failed to result in a meaningful change of policy. The controversy has been building since November, when Jonathan M. Katz wrote a piece for The Atlantic headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”
Of course, this is a crisis of Substack’s own making, and it could resolve it quickly if its executives choose to do so. But an obstinate refusal to deviate from what they see as their commitment to free speech has so far led them to do nothing — or at least not enough to keep a highly regarded publication like Platformer from leaving. In a December post that has been widely criticized and ridiculed on Substack Notes, co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote in part:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse.
We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.
The problem, as I wrote for GBH News three years ago, is that Substack has two separate businesses. One is a solid contribution to the tech community: great software that makes it easy to self-publish and solicit payments from your audience. The other is to establish itself as a major force in the publishing world, paying celebrities like Newton (he says Substack provided him with health-insurance subsidies and legal assistance) and promoting their content. Now problems with the second business are threatening to overwhelm the first.
Please become a supporter of Media Nation for $5 a month. Supporters receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive early content, photography, a roundup of the week’s posts and even a song of the week. Just click here.
The internet itself can be a pretty terrible place, filled with terrorists, pedophiles and, yes, Nazis. But the net is also neutral. Substack, like Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads and most other platforms, is anything but, promoting certain types of content for eyeballs, clicks and profit. Substack is not just hosting Nazis, it is arguably pushing their content in front of readers and making money from it. Newton wrote:
Substack’s aspirations now go far beyond web hosting. It touts the value of its network of publications as a primary reason to use its product, and has built several tools to promote that network. It encourages writers to recommend other Substack publications. It sends out a weekly digest of publications for readers to consider subscribing to.
Substack has made itself a congenial home for writers once associated with the left who’ve since moved right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. It will be interesting to see if they say something. Perhaps we’ll hear from Bari Weiss, a heterodox conservative who occasionally shows some backbone and who publishes a site called The Free Press on Substack.
The writer I’ll be watching most closely, though, is Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian who is perhaps Substack’s biggest star. She has to be thinking about moving her “Letters from an American” to another platform, but I haven’t seen anything from her so far. If she would like to ghost Substack and move to Ghost, though, I’m sure Casey Newton would lend a hand.
Heather Cox Richardson interviews President Biden in 2022. Photo by the White House.
Earlier this week I finished the audio version of Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” Like her Substack newsletter, “Letters from an American,” “Democracy Awakening” is well-written, civil, and dedicated to engendering some optimism during the dark time we’re living through. Bonus: Richardson narrates the book herself.
Richardson is more optimistic than I am about the future of the country, but, as she reminds us over and over again, we’ve been here before — in the 1850s, when the slaveholding minority captured all the levers of government power (let’s hope we can avoid a civil war this time); in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal were threatened by a homegrown fascist movement; and at several points in between.
Reviewing an audio book is always difficult since it’s not really possible to take notes, but this review in The Guardian by Charles Kaiser will give you a taste:
Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history — and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.
“Democracy Awakening,” thankfully, is no marathon. At a brisk eight and a half hours, you can listen to it on a few long walks or drives. If you’re a fan of “Letters from an American,” the most popular newsletter on Substack, then no doubt you’ll be inspired by “Democracy Awakening” as well.
A few words about the extraordinary scoop broken Monday evening by Politico that the U.S. Supreme Court has put together a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, thus freeing states to ban abortion.
First, we all make fun of Politico. I make fun of Politico. It succeeded by taking the horse-race approach to politics and amping it up on steroids, which hasn’t been good for anyone. But Politico is a large news organization with many talented journalists, most definitely including Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, who broke the Roe story. It is possible to both generalize about Politico’s shortcomings and praise it when it produces extraordinary work.
Second, Brian Stelter, writing for CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, flagged a tweet from SCOTUSblog that is worth pondering: “It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.”
It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.
Good. If the right-wing majority is going to turn back the clock on reproductive rights by 50 years, then let the entire court descend into scorpions in a bottle. The interests of society as a whole may be better served by the spectacle of a court in chaos. We all need to understand that this is now a rogue institution, undone by Donald Trump’s illegitimate choices of Neil Gorsuch, who holds the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland, and Amy Coney Barrett, rushed through at the last minute.
Third, the draft decision cites the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson as a case whose outcome was so egregiously wrong that it had to be overturned in its entirety. Plessy failed to recognize the rights of Black Americans under the 14th Amendment and was in fact reversed in Brown v. Board of Education 58 years later. The decision to overturn Roe, though, is more like Plessy than Brown in that it takes away long-established constitutional rights.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson compares the draft opinion to the infamous Dred Scott decision, the 1857 Supreme Court case that took away what few rights Black Americans had at that time and paved the way for the Civil War. She writes in her newsletter:
And so here we are. A minority, placed in control of the U.S. Supreme Court by a president who received a minority of the popular vote and then, when he lost reelection, tried to overturn our democracy, is explicitly taking away a constitutional right that has been protected for fifty years. Its attack on federal protection of civil rights applies not just to abortion, but to all the protections put in place since World War II: the right to use birth control, marry whomever you wish, live in desegregated spaces, and so on.
The decision isn’t final yet, but I don’t see how we can expect it to change. This is a dark day in American history — the latest in many dark days. God help us all.
Although I started blogging in 2002, the first regular column that I ever wrote for a digital publication was for The Guardian. From 2007 until 2011, I produced a weekly commentary about media, politics and culture that was not much different from what I write now for GBH News. What was new was that, for the first time, I could embed links in my column, just as if I was blogging. I did — liberally. (Only later did my editor tell me that the software he used stripped out all the links I had put in, which meant that he had to restore them all by hand. And this was at one of the most digitally focused newspapers on the planet.)
Links have become a standard part of digital journalism. So I was surprised recently when Ed Lyons, a local political commentator who’s an old-fashioned moderate Republican, posted a Twitter thread denouncing links. It began: “I hereby declare I am *done* with hyperlinks in political writing. Pull up a chair and let me rant about how we got to this ridiculous place. What started off as citation has unintentionally turned into some sort of pundit performance art.”
The whole thread is worth reading. And it got me thinking about the value of linking. Back when everything was in print, you couldn’t link, of course, so opinion columns — constrained by space limitations — tended to include a lot of unattributed facts. The idea was that you didn’t need to credit commonly known background material, such as “North Dakota is north of South Dakota.” Sometimes, though, it was hard to know what was background and what wasn’t, and you didn’t want to do anything that might be perceived as unethical. When linking came along, you could attribute everything just by linking to it. And many of us did.
In his thread, Lyons also wrote that “it is my opinion that nobody visits any of these links. I think readers see the link and say oh well that must be true.” I agree. In fact, I tell my students that no one clicks on links, which means that they should always write clearly and include all the information they want the reader to know. The link should be used as a supplement, not as a substitute. To the extent possible, they should also give full credit to the publication and the writer when they’re quoting something as well as providing a link.
I agree with Lyons that links ought to add value and not just be put in gratuitously. And they certainly shouldn’t be snuck in as a way of whispering something that you wouldn’t want to say out loud. The classic example of that would be a notorious column a couple of years ago by Bret Stephens of The New York Times, who wrote that the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews might be genetically superior — and backed it up with a link to a study co-authored by a so-called scientist who had been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist and a eugenicist. Stephens’ assertion was bad enough; his citation was worse, even if few people read it.
One of the most successful self-published writers currently is the historian Heather Cox Richardson. I’ve noticed that she leaves links out of her Substack essays entirely, posting them at the bottom instead. Here’s an example. I’m not going to do that, but it seems to be a decent compromise — showing her work while not letting a bunch of links clutter up her text.
In any event, I don’t expect you to follow the links I include in my writing. They’re there if you want to know more, or if you want to see if I’m fairly characterizing what I’m describing. At the very least, Lyons has reminded me of the value of including links only when they really matter.
This essay was part of last week’s Media Nation Member Newsletter. To become a member for just $5 a month, please click here.
Mitch McConnell. Photo (cc) 2014 by Gage Skidmore.
And so it’s over. In the aftermath of Impeachment II, the main controversy is about whether the Democrats did the right thing in reversing themselves over calling witnesses. I think they made a wise judgment. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hypocrisy shows why.
In a blistering speech, McConnell endorsed the entire factual basis of the Democrats’ case against Trump. “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.” And there was this:
Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his vice president. Predictably and foreseeably under the circumstances, members of the mob seemed to interpret this as further inspiration to lawlessness and violence.
Yet McConnell still voted against conviction, relying on the bogus argument that a vote to convict was unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.
At the end of all this, no reasonable person doubts that Trump incited the mob — not just on Jan. 6, but over the course of many months. No reasonable person doubts that he was reveling in the destruction, or that Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler was telling the truth about a toxic exchange between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Trump. Seven Republicans voted to convict Trump, making this the most bipartisan impeachment in history.
Given all that, it’s time for the Democrats to move on and let the center of gravity finally shift from Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.
Not everyone agrees, of course. The normally pragmatic Josh Marshall was apoplectic Saturday, writing in Talking Points Memo that the decision not to call witnesses was “inexplicable and maddening, to many or most Democrats outside the chamber because Democrats appeared to hold all the cards and all the votes and yet capitulated entirely.”
While it’s reasonable to imagine that witnesses would illustrate Trump’s depravity, it seems entirely likely that, as Trump’s lawyers continued simply to lie and their lies got spread through right-wing media as truth, Americans would have learned the opposite of what they should have.
Instead, the issue of Trump’s guilt on January 6 will play out in a courtroom, where there are actual rules about telling the truth.
We have lived through a terrible time, and it’s not over yet. The future direction of the Republican Party is far from certain, and it’s easy to imagine a thoroughly Trumpified party recapturing the House in 2022 as a result of gerrymandering and low voter turnout.
What we all need to concentrate on for the next two years is good governance — pushing for policies and programs that help people and, as best we can, putting the Trump era behind us. Biden is off to a good start, but a continuing obsession with Trump will hold him back. And that will hurt everyone.
Substack, the newsletter and blogging platform that got so much attention a few years ago, is in a world of trouble. Casey Newton is 
.jpg){kind=link}