Barack Obama’s administration threatened reporters with jail if they refused to turn over their confidential sources. But he didn’t order raids on reporters’ homes. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
Back in 2012, I wrote an opinion piece for The Huffington Post (now just HuffPost) that I headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.” The premise was that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush and other presidents before him, was disrespecting the First Amendment’s protection of independent journalism by taking reporters to court and theatening them with jail if they didn’t reveal the identities of White House sources leaking to them.
At least Obama, Bush et al. were following a legal process. As The Associated Press reports, Donald Trump’s FBI, headed by the buffoonish but dangerous Kash Patel, raided the home of a Washington Post journalist to grab what they claimed were classified documents provided by a Pentagon contractor.
With Donald Trump and JD Vance cheering on as their armed thugs terrorize American cities, you might think this is not the optimal time for revisiting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment about consigning half of Donald Trump’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.”
Yet according to Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, the attitude that underlies Clinton’s statement has a lot to do with where we find ourselves today. Sandel argues that we are reaping the whirlwind of meritocracy. That ideology, closely associated with neoliberalism and free trade, shaped much of the post-World War II era, especially starting in the 1980s. It ended in the Trump-led populist revolt in the U.S., the Brexit vote in the U.K., and the rightward turn of other liberal democracies in Europe and elsewhere.
Meritocracy, Sandel writes, has led to the mistaken belief among elites that they deserve the wealth and prestige that have been bestowed upon them, and that those left behind deserve their lot in life as well. Moreover, the left-behind believe it, too. In a more formally hierarchical society, like an aristocracy, everyone knows the game is rigged. Thus those at the top understand that their privileged position is an accident of birth, while those at the bottom are able to hang on to some semblance of self-esteem. By contrast, if they have been sorted out as meritocracy’s “losers,” they have been taught to believe they have no one to blame but themselves.
Pete Hegseth x 4. Photo (cc) 2021 by Gage Skidmore.
Beware the narrative shift. Two stories that have become media obsessions are slowly being recast. One is deadly serious; the other is ridiculous, although it nevertheless says a lot about journalism ethics.
First, the deadly serious story. We are beginning to see the emergence of a narrative that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is in the clear, more or less, as long as he can show that he didn’t order a second attack on that boat in the Caribbean in order to kill two wounded crew members.
The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
Google appears to be throttling AI searches related to Donald Trump’s obviously addled mental state. Jay Peters reports (sub. req.) in The Verge:
There’s been a lot of coverage of the mental acuity of both President Trump and President Biden, who are the two oldest presidents ever, so it’s reasonable to expect that people might query Google about it. The company may be worried about accurately presenting information on a sensitive subject, as AI overviews remain susceptible to delivering incorrect information. But in this case, it may also be worried about the president’s response to such information. Google agreed this week to pay $24.5 million to settle a highly questionable lawsuit about Trump’s account being banned from YouTube.
I wanted to see if I could reproduce Peters’ results, and sure enough, Google is still giving Trump special treatment, even though Peters’ embarrassing story was published two days ago. I searched “is trump showing signs of dementia” in Google’s “All” tab, which these days will generally give you an AI-generated summary before getting to the links. Instead, you get nothing but links. The same thing happened when I switched to “AI Mode.”
Next I searched for “is biden showing signs of dementia” at the “All” tab. As with Trump, I got nothing but links — no AI summary at the top. But when I switched to “AI Mode,” I got a detailed AI summary that begins:
In response to concerns and observations about President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, a range of opinions and reports have emerged. It’s important to note that diagnosing dementia or cognitive decline requires a formal medical assessment by qualified professionals.
I have mixed feelings about AI searches, though, like many people, I make use of them — always checking the citations to make sure I’m getting accurate information. But as Peters observes, it looks like Google is flinching.
This may be the most important story you’ll read all month. Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign report in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) that we are losing our economic dynamism. Americans have stopped moving to different parts of the country, and they are less likely to leave their jobs to try something new.
In addition, the combination of record-low interest rates a few years ago and much higher rates now means that too many people feel like they’re locked into their home. Putzier and Ensign write:
This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.
This phenomenon has been building for years, although it’s gotten worse since COVID. Some of the more traditional liberal policies that Joe Biden was pursuing might have helped reverse these trends, but now Donald Trump is creating economic uncertainty with massive tax cuts for the rich and his chaotic tariff policy.
I’m one to talk. I have always lived in the Boston area, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else; my wife and I have lived in one apartment and three homes in just two communities. Over the past 45 years I’ve worked at exactly three jobs, not counting a few short-time stints when I was unemployed during the 1990 recession.
But that was a conscious choice. In the Journal article, you’ll see that a number of people interviewed would like find a better job and a different place to live, but they’re stymied by factors beyond their control.
Our country is not just spinning out of control — it’s also spinning down. We need government policies that will help restore the dynamism that defined us until recently.
An ‘abundance’ of punditry
Do we need another publication aimed at helping to define a new form of liberalism? Whether we do or not, we’re getting one. It’s called The Argument, and it sounds like it might be interesting.
Max Tani of Semafor reports that Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic recently to start the project, which sounds like it will be largely rooted in the “abundance” agenda promoted by writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book of that name. The idea is that the left has stymied innovation and growth by creating a bureaucratic and legal framework aimed more at stopping things rather than building, whether it be public transportation or housing.
Indeed, Thompson will be one of the contributors to The Argument, which is published at Substack.
Based on Demsas’ introductory video and message, it sounds like The Argument will mainly appeal to the center left in an attempt to try to craft a vision that reaches beyond not just the MAGA pestilence that has infected the body politic but also the excesses of the progressive left, which she doesn’t exactly define. That’s going to be hard given the ease with which the right caricatured Kamala Harris as a left-wing menace while she was actually espousing moderately liberal policies. Demsas writes:
We will convene not just self-described political liberals, but socialists, moderates, libertarians and center-right conservatives. I won’t agree with everyone we publish, and I doubt they all agree with everything I have said, but we will only publish people who seek truth from facts and who are excited to engage directly with their opponent’s ideas.
I can think of a whole host of reasons why The Argument might fail, or modestly succeed while fading into obscurity and irrelevance. But let’s hope that it will have a wider impact than that. Democrats have a difficult needle to thread if they are going to return to power in 2026 and ’28. A new source of ideas with broad, popular appeal would be a welcome development.
AI’s power grab
We are nearing the end, blessedly, of what’s been a brutally hot summer. I don’t know what we’d do without air conditioning, or, frankly, how we got by without it when I was growing up — and yes, heat waves were shorter and nights were cooler back in the 1960s and ’70s.
But air conditioning is powered by electricity, and we are using it at a reckless rate as the AI surge continues apace. You can’t avoid it. It’s not just a matter of consciously using it with programs like ChatGPT and Claude; now you can’t even search Google without getting an AI-generated answer at the top of your screen. I recently tested the latest version of ChatGPT by asking it to draw a photorealistic version of Bob Dylan drumming. You can see the result; but how many kilowatts did I use?
The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about AI and electricity, noting that AI data centers were already consuming 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and that it may rise to 12% by 2028. We need vastly more electricity-generating capacity, and yet Krugman observes that Trump has “a deep, irrational hatred for renewable energy.” He adds that many tasks being performed by brute-force AI could be turned over instead to lighter, less-energy-intensive versions; still, he observes:
It’s obvious that any attempt to make AI more energy-efficient would lead to howls from tech bros who believe that they embody humanity’s future — and these bros have bought themselves a lot of political power.
So I don’t know how this will play out. I do know that your future electricity bills depend on the answer.
Among other things, news organizations are embracing AI both for better and for worse. My own view is that there’s a lot more to dislike about AI than to like. But it’s here to stay, and we might as well try to use it in ways that are ethical and responsible. Unfortunately, we appear to be rushing headlong in the wrong direction.
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.
It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.
We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.
Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.
My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.
The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.
Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.
I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.
Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2021. Photo (cc) 2021 by Mike Maguire.
Four years ago today, Donald Trump staged a violent attempted coup so that he could remain in the White House rather than turn over the presidency to Joe Biden. And today, he’s returning to the office that he disgraced. Here is something I wrote on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. My closing sentence, unfortunately, is even more apt today than it was in 2021.
The media are filled with one-year retrospectives about the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. I can’t say I’m paying much attention to them. We’ve had a firehose of coverage from the moment it happened, and appropriately so. An anniversary doesn’t add anything to what we already know, and to what we still need to know.
Will we remember Jan. 6 the way we remember Sept. 11, 2001, or the way our parents and grandparents remembered Dec. 7, 1941? Probably not, though neither will it soon be forgotten. And one of the acts of remembering is recalling what we were doing on that day.
I was hiking in the Middlesex Fells, as I often do. I took a photo of two signs on a tree because I thought they were funny: one said “Keep Out”; the other urged hikers to maintain social distancing, which seemed like an odd admonition if you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.
I emerged from the woods around 3 p.m. and turned on the car radio. NPR was carrying audio from the “PBS NewsHour,” and Judy Woodruff was freaking out. At first I figured the Republicans were trying to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes to delay Joe Biden’s being declared the official winner of the presidential election. That, after all, had been predicted.
Within a few moments, though, I learned the truth: that a mob of rioters had descended on the Capitol, had broken inside and were rampaging through the halls of Congress. It was our first attempted coup, aided and abetted by Donald Trump, and it may not be the last.
These are dark times, and I’m not optimistic about what the next few years will bring.
The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about 
