Here’s what I’ve found interesting: the media needs to start sharing the full story about Trump, the Texas GOP platform endorses the death penalty for abortion patients, Trump’s social media posts focus on revenge, Senator Dick Durbin needs to start doing his job, a D-Day hero gets recognition after decades of racism, Fontana police psychologically torture a suspect into falsely confessing that he killed a person who was alive, a peek into a far-right group chat, and a Texas school board member changes her mind after reviewing what’s actually in the school curriculum.
#1
Voters still aren’t getting the full story on Trump. Journalists need to fix that ASAP. (Jennifer Schulze, Heartland Signal)
Top secret government documents hidden in his bedroom
Promising to testify but then not testifying in his hush money trial
Threatening a third term. Again
Hinting at a birth control ban. Again
These are just some of the Trump things that happened recently, and none of them got sufficient news coverage. Some Trump stories were completely ignored, while others were given the one-and-done treatment instead of sustained in-depth coverage. A few were just plain wrong. None seem to comprehend the pattern of behavior.
It’s been 9+ years of Trump dominating the country’s politics, and in that time, there has certainly been smart, impactful coverage of his aberrant campaigns and his disastrous presidency. But that is the exception, not the rule.
In fact, I’d argue that the mainstream media coverage of Trump has gotten worse especially in the past year as journalists still try to apply normal reporting practices to an abnormal candidate. When you add in the robust right-wing propaganda efforts by Fox and other extremist media outlets, we find ourselves being practically swallowed whole by lies and disinformation.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Recent polls show that a significant number of American voters believe things that are demonstrably untrue. It even goes beyond the vibecession where voters tell pollsters that the economy is in recession (it’s not), stock markets have fallen (they have recently achieved record highs), and unemployment is near a 50-year high (it’s actually near a 50-year low). We also have recently learned that 17 percent of voters blame Joe Biden for the loss of the constitutional right to abortion (Brian Klaas explains why that’s obviously incorrect). Reporters and editors have been defensive when asked about this disconnect, sometimes saying it isn’t their job to support Biden. That is true—but that’s also not the point. There is a difference between supporting Biden and providing as much coverage of the stock market records as they did when Trump was in office (to take just one example). Informing voters is perhaps the media’s most important job, but several polls demonstrate that too many voters are not perceiving reality. I wish we lived in a world where this failure would lead our elite media to reconsider how they should cover this election.
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#2
Texas GOP Platform Endorses Death Penalty for Abortion Patients (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)
We need to talk about Plank 35 in the Texas GOP platform. Because while there’s been lots of coverage about how extremist the state’s Republican convention was, people seem to have missed the fact that delegates adopted a platform that calls for abortion patients to be punished as murderers. In Texas, that could mean the death penalty.
I wish I was exaggerating.
The GOP’s platform demands “equal protection for the preborn,” and for Texas legislation to give fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses “equal protection of the law.”
If you’re a regular reader, you know that “equal protection” is a call for abortion to be treated as homicide, and for abortion patients to be prosecuted as murders. (Remember South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, and Georgia’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act? Both were bills to make abortion punishable as a homicide.)
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
As Valenti explains, we should be treating this plank like the “big fucking deal” it is. Many Republican politicians are claiming to be moderates on reproductive rights, even as they support ideas like this one and refuse to defend the right to access contraception. They are not moderates. They are hoping they can get through this election cycle without answering for their extremism and the Christian nationalist ideology that is its foundation. These rights are on the ballot this November, and only by re-electing Joe Biden will we have the chance to push back against these extreme ideas.
#3
Revenge: analysis of Trump posts shows relentless focus on punishing enemies (David Smith, The Guardian)
A major study of Donald Trump’s social media posts has revealed the scale of the former US president’s ambitions to target Joe Biden, judges and other perceived political enemies if he returns to power.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organisation, analysed more than 13,000 messages published by Trump on his Truth Social platform and found him vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes.
The presumptive Republican nominee has threatened to use the federal government to go after Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times since the start of 2023, the study found. These threats include FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time.
He has also threatened or suggested that the FBI and justice department should take action against senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and even non-governmental organisations.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
These threats have grown in their intensity after a jury convicted Trump of felonies. We know that elected officials are scared of defying Trump because of their fears of being the target of a violent reaction. We have seen Trump supporters try to dox the jurors and post violent threats against them, the judge, and the prosecutors. They aren’t being subtle. We must not consider these empty threats. We should be clear about what Trump and his supporters will do if they gain control of the Department of Justice. We should expect that Trump’s rhetoric will become more threatening as we approach election day.
#4
Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job (Noah Berlatsky, Public Notice)
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet [gave] it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax.
The hearing meant that for at least a day, everyone talked about whether the DOJ is treating Trump unfairly, rather than about, say, whether Trump should step aside from the GOP presidential nomination given his felony convictions, or whether Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito should recuse himself after an insurrectionist flag was flown over his house.
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Can we really blame some voters for wondering why they work so hard to get Democrats a majority when their leaders refuse to use the powers it gives them? It is shameful that there have been no hearings about the Supreme Court’s ethical failures. Why hasn’t the Senate asked about Jared Kushner’s two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia? Or why one of Kushner’s projects in Belgrade will include the creation of a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression?” A Congressional hearing may not directly change the actions of the Supreme Court Justices or Kushner. However, the media coverage it generates will inform more voters about what’s at stake. Plus, voters will see Democrats willing to fight for their values and to protect the Constitution and our democracy. That matters! Having the chairperson’s gavel creates opportunities. I am tired of seeing the Democrats fritter them away.
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#5
The Forgotten Hero of D-Day (Garrett M. Graff, Politico Magazine)
By 10 a.m., small pockets of shell-shocked U.S. troops had rallied and fought their way to the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, but the beach behind was a chaotic scene of wounded men and discarded equipment; bodies of the dead and the nearly dead rolled in the surf. As Woodson recounted, “There was a lot of debris and men were drowning all around me. I swam to the shore and crawled on the beach to a cliff out of the range of the machine guns and snipers. I was far from where I was supposed to be, but there wasn’t any other medic around here on Omaha Beach. … I had pulled a tent roll out of the water and so I set up a first-aid station. It was the only one on the beach.”
He’d stay there on the sandy and rocky beach, treating the wounded, for the next 30 hours, working through the day, the night and nearly all of the next day — all while trying to treat his own shrapnel injuries to his groin and back — before he was evacuated himself. Woodson comforted and collected the injured, administered sulfa powder, bandaged wounds, tightened tourniquets, dispensed plasma, removed bullets and even amputated one soldier’s foot. As a historical commission that examined his record later summarized, “For 30 continuous hours while under enemy fire, Woodson cared for more than 200 casualties. Even after being relieved at 4:00 p.m. on 7 June, Woodson gave artificial respiration to three men who had gone underwater during a [landing craft’s] landing attempt. Only then did Woodson seek further treatment.” Over the course of his time on the beach, Woodson almost certainly saved dozens or even scores of lives.
All told, the U.S. suffered around 3,700 casualties at Omaha Beach, including about 800 dead, meaning that if that estimate is approximately accurate, Woodson personally helped treat somewhere around five to seven percent of all U.S. casualties on the bloodiest beach of D-Day.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Corporal Waverly B. Woodson Jr. did not receive the honors he was due for his heroic actions on D-Day because of racism and administrative errors. As Graff explains, “Not a single one of the million-plus Black personnel who served in World War II, many of whom ultimately did serve bravely on the front lines and assumed huge personal risk in combat, received one of the 432 Medals of Honor awarded during the war.” Woodson’s heroism was noted then, but until this past Monday, he had not received any recognition. Finally, the Pentagon announced this week that Woodson will posthumously receive the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest medal for combat valor. It’s a step—but more is required to ensure the non-white heroes of the Second World War receive the recognition they deserve. Their families deserve it—and history should demand it. I hope you’ll read Graff’s story to learn more about Woodson and the racism we still need to overcome.
#6
‘Psychologically tortured’: California city pays man nearly $1m after 17-hour police interrogation (Sam Levin, The Guardian)
A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.
During the 2018 interrogation of Thomas Perez Jr by police in Fontana, a city east of Los Angeles, officers suggested they would have Perez’s dog euthanized as a result of his actions, according to a complaint and footage of the encounter. A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.
The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yes, you read that correctly. Fontana police officers psychologically tortured a person enough to get him to falsely confess to killing someone who was quite alive. Many people do not understand why innocent people would falsely confess to crimes. The Innocence Project explains why in this article. This horrifying story shows what the police can do when they wrongly think they know the story. It should not be legal for the police to lie to a suspect during an interrogation. The officers here should be fired. Writing a check should not make this atrocity go away. Many innocent people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit because they thought they could trust the police enough to help. Talk to an attorney before you make that error.
#7
Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat (Ken Silverstein, The New Republic)
In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”
I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
It is quite revealing to see what far-right supporters will write when they think they are only texting their fellow travelers. I am surprised so many supposedly security-conscious people trusted that no one in a group larger than 600 would leak the conversations. Thankfully for us, a few people did. Silverstein gives us a glimpse into what far-right people from across the world are thinking about current events: “Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad.” I don’t think people reading this newsletter will be surprised that such a group would include people who felt this way. However, it is still eye-opening to see who is involved and how they look forward to becoming more powerful worldwide after a Trump victory.
#8
A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. (Jeremy Schwartz, Texas Tribune and ProPublica)
Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”
But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
This is a remarkable story about someone who believed a narrative about our schools, ran for the school board, and discovered what she thought was false. I have a lot of respect for Courtney Gore’s willingness to follow the evidence. Unfortunately, she found that her allies were not interested in learning the truth. Worse, she would face threats of violence for not following the script. I wish what we see in this story was not such a rare outcome.
Quick Pitches
- Will Someone Please Buy the Donald Trump Movie? (Matthew Belloni, Puck)
In the last issue of this newsletter, I discussed how a documentary about the January 6 insurrection may have been buried by its distributor. Here’s another movie, that received Oscar buzz at Cannes but still hasn’t found a distributor in the United States. What an interesting election-year trend. - CHP isn’t supposed to aim less-lethal munitions at protesters’ heads and fire into crowds. It did at UCLA (Sergio Olmos, CalMatters)
This is a clear-cut abuse of power. If the CHP’s leadership—and our elected officials—can’t prevent these abuses, we need to replace them. - What’s in a swing? A metrics explainer (Noah Woodward, The Advance Scout)
Major League Baseball started providing a number of new batting metrics this year. Woodward explains what they mean—and what we don’t understand—and how baseball teams and fans could put them to use. - Does One Line Fix Google? (Ernie Smith, Tedium)
Would you like to get search results without all of the junk Google has added to them in recent years? You may want to try the new “web” filter that makes Google search results appear as they did about a decade ago. - It’s a trap! The economic argument against blowing up the Death Star (Peter Armstrong, CBC News)
An economist explains why destroying it created a Galactic depression worse than what the United States faced in the 1930s. - The ‘Sift’ strategy: A four-step method for spotting misinformation (Amanda Ruggeri, BBC News)
Some tips that I fear are going to be extremely useful this election year.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Trump’s disdain for excellence is neither a personal quirk nor an anomaly among autocrats present and past. It is logical: they see the work of government as worthy only of mockery, and so they continue to mock it when they have power.” (Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy)
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