Gum Up the Works

Welcome, everyone! Thank you for coming. Whatever we can do to resist--to disrupt, to gum up the works, to have joy and determination, to be in community, to make our voices heard loud and clear--lifts our spirits, keeps us going, and can change the world. We’re in this together!  The Big Ugly Bill has passed, Congress and the Supreme Court are rubber-stamping everything the President asks for, and few checks and balances remain.

The United States has transformed itself from a global beacon of democracy into a rogue state of greed, corruption, and cynicism. Even as this nightmare is happening, many Americans don’t appear terribly concerned about the similarity between our current circumstances and those of Germany in the late 1930s. We see the news filled with the latest baseball stories, the hoopla over Hulk Hogan’s demise, Trump opening yet another golf course in Scotland, and the drama of what Ghislaine Maxwell is going to say and who’s coaching her to say it and whether she’ll get a pardon.

How do we know about what’s going on in the world?  Normally, that’s the business of journalism. Journalism requires both skills and ethics. Real journalists operate by gathering information by attending events, conducting interviews; researching to gain a comprehensive picture; verifying information and cross-checking its authenticity, making sense of it, and presenting it with clarity. Real journalists are trained to uphold accuracy, fairness, objectivity, and accountability. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1920, journalism is essential for enabling citizens to participate effectively in democracy.

In America, that system of professional and ethical journalism is dying. The last six months have inflicted mortal wounds on it. The decline started long ago but really accelerated in the 1980s and 90s, with big corporate mergers and acquisitions of news operations. The delivery of news has also radically changed with developments in technology: with the advent of cable and then the Internet, the nation’s news environment has been atomized, targeting every possible niche audience.

Social media is by and large no journalistic operation, but a mill of rumor, fashion, scandal, and sensation.  It’s shocking to know that about one in four young adults gets all their news from TikTok. And in the last year or two, A.I. has exploded into the mix. Not only can A.I. “hallucinate”(that is, make stuff up, like the recent case of Musk’s Grok chatbot praising Hitler), but it can be, and is, deliberately used to nefarious ends.

Even this chaos in delivering the news--chaos created by corporate culture’s profit motive and by successive revolutions in technology--isn’t enough for the Trump Administration. A key step in installing a fascist regime is controlling the media and what information, or fake information, they purvey. So now we see Trump and his subordinates punishing major media for reporting that contradicts Trump’s “truth.”

CBS just caved and paid enormous extortion fees to the government (to the tune of $200 million to Trump’s “presidential library,” mm-hmm); it’s terminating professional journalists and heads of news departments, as in the heartbreaking fate of the venerable 60 minutes. ABC has already paid its price, and will no doubt pay more in the future to a dictator who strikes again where he sees weakness. Last week the Administration succeeded in getting Congress to claw back its appropriation of over a billion dollars to NPR and PBS, in a move that will kill off some rural public media channels that many people rely on.

So mainstream journalism is on life support. Two nights ago, on the PBS evening news, anchor Amna Nawaz was obliged to interview Republican congressman Mike Heridopolos of Florida. Heridopolos had the gall to say, regarding Mike Johnson’s early dismissal of the House of Representatives in hopes that the Epstein affair will die down by autumn, “Our speaker Mike Johnson wants [the Epstein papers] out there, transparent.” The congressman further maintained that the government won’t cut Medicaid to anyone at all, and will give tax cuts “to the people who need it most.” Nawaz, a seasoned journalist who normally fact-checks such idiocy, had clearly been instructed not to challenge him.

Yesterday, the legal affairs commentator Joyce Vance wrote of the importance and new relevance of George Orwell’s novel 1984. 1984’s dystopian allegory mounts an argument for “the protection of democratic institutions against the corrosive effects of misinformation and attempts to rewrite history.” (First published in 1949, it was banned from the Soviet bloc, whose totalitarian rule it parodied.) In the novel, the governing party has invented Newspeak, a language designed to narrow the range of thought as a tool to control the citizens. The book came to Vance’s mind now that Trump’s FCC chair plans to put in place what he calls a “bias monitor” who will report directly to Trump as part of the deal for Skydance to acquire CBS. “A bias monitor,” she comments. “Accepted by a major news network. Not a huge outcry as Trump brings the thought police of fiction into fact.

She then quotes 1984 directly, where it describes what becomes of its country: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Sound familiar? The Gulf of America, Pocahontas, Little Marco? Obama as a client of Epstein’s? Good people on both sides?

With Fox and Breitbart News and other outlets rewriting if not stopping History, and the legacy news outlets such as CBS and public television accommodating to the new fascism, what are we to do?

If we ever want to get out of this, it is our responsibility to seek and find and read good journalism to stay informed. This means using sources that help us understand the complexity of issues and think critically.  The New York Times and NPR and PBS do as well as they can for the time being; still more trustworthy are news sources in other, freer countries. Britain’s The Guardian and Qatar’s Al Jazeera are readily available online and are very good. Principled American journalists who have quit their jobs protesting censorship now write on Substack. A lot of what they write is free, but if you pay nominal amounts to subscribe, you’re supporting those valuable truth-tellers and allowing them to function free of the yoke of censorship.

It is our responsibility to stay informed, to not accept lies and rumor and omissions. If we ever wondered how the German people could have stayed blissfully and wilfully ignorant of the murder of millions of their neighbors during the 1940s, look no further than the present: it’s all happening now in the mass starvation of two million Palestinians, conducted with malice and purpose by Netanyahu’s Israel and abetted by weaponry from the United States.

And here at home, how different are we from those Germans? Americans play pickleball and shop and go about our normal lives while twelve million brown people among us are starting to be carted away to God knows where, many of them fully legal immigrants who have broken no laws. The Big Ugly Bill has allocated 45 billion dollars to build gulags for them within our borders. It’s an unfortunate human tendency to turn away from horrors and be in denial; fascism’s repression of truth is making that denial easy. It’s our responsibility not to let it, to fully understand and articulate what’s really going on--to refuse to succumb to Newspeak.

Let us gum up the works. Let us resist in every way we can. Let us find purpose and mutual support in community. Let’s get informed, not through Newspeak but standing firm through truth!