{"id":37372,"date":"2024-11-01T13:20:28","date_gmt":"2024-11-01T20:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=37372"},"modified":"2024-11-01T13:20:29","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T20:20:29","slug":"wapo-and-the-la-times-obeying-in-advance-should-confirm-our-worst-fears-about-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/11\/01\/wapo-and-the-la-times-obeying-in-advance-should-confirm-our-worst-fears-about-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"WAPO AND THE LA TIMES OBEYING IN ADVANCE SHOULD CONFIRM OUR WORST FEARS ABOUT TRUMP"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

THU, 10\/31\/2024 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON<\/a> (Occupy.com)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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According to author and Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, the number-one rule when faced with tyranny is to not obey in advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost of the power in authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked,\u201d Snyder wrote<\/a> in his \u201cOn Tyranny\u201d book. \u201cA citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[T]he major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: Don\u2019t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don\u2019t protect yourself too early,\u201d he added<\/a>. \u201c[By] mentally and physically conceding, you\u2019re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Snyder also urges citizens grappling with the threat of authoritarianism to \u201cdefend institutions,\u201d \u201cbelieve in truth,\u201d and \u201cbe as courageous as you can.\u201d As Occupy.com<\/a> has previously reported<\/a>, truth and facts are antithetical to fascism. Authoritarians depend on a populace so overexposed to lies and disinformation that truth itself becomes subjective, making the people that much easier to control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo abandon facts is to abandon freedom,\u201d Snyder explained<\/a>. \u201cIf nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author\u2019s most urgent plea is for courage in the face of looming fascism. He wrote: \u201cIf none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent decisions by two of the most influential national newspapers of record \u2014 the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times \u2014 to not publish their endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris should be seen by every American as a stark warning that these two institutions are assuming the worst if former President Donald Trump is elected to a second term. Their non-endorsements, while cowardly, also say a lot more about how seriously they take Trump\u2019s threats to democracy and his promises of vengeance against his enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ex-WaPo reporter says non-endorsement is \u201cfive-alarm fire stuff\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong \u2014 a medical technology billionaire who bought the paper in 2018 for roughly $500 million<\/a> \u2014 put the kibosh<\/a> on the Times\u2019 planned endorsement of Harris in the 2024 election, he insisted it was to allow readers to make up their own minds (his daughter, Nika, said it was to protest the current administration\u2019s handling of the Gaza crisis, though Soon-Shiong said that didn\u2019t factor into his decision). He wrote on X<\/a> (formerly Twitter) that the editorial board was asked to \u201cdraft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenure at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years,\u201d he continued. \u201cInstead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three members of the Times\u2019 editorial board resigned after their pre-written endorsement was scrapped by their employer. One of those resignations came from Robert Greene, who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing<\/a> about criminal justice reform. He insisted that the job of differentiating between each candidate\u2019s policy platform was up to the journalists in the newsroom, whereas the editorial board\u2019s job was to take a position and vigorously make their case. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger \u2014 who we previously endorsed for U.S. Senate?\u201d Editorials editor Mariel Garza wrote in her resignation letter to the Times\u2019 executive editor. \u201cThe non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make down to school board races.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NPR reported that Soon-Shiong may have had different motivations<\/a> than he shared with the public. Part of his fortune was made after he invented the drug Abraxane, which is prescribed to treat breast, lung, and pancreatic cancers. And the outlet further reported that the billionaire businessman has previously had to rely on the Food and Drug Administration to approve his products for use by the general public, and once even sought a role within the Trump administration as a \u201chealth care czar,\u201d<\/a> according to Stat News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you have a lot of exposure to heavily regulated industries, I\u2019d be very surprised if it\u2019s something that media executives are not thinking about,\u201d Semafor editor Ben Smith told NPR.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of the Washington Post, its own billionaire owner \u2014 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos \u2014 also stepped in at the last minute<\/a> and canceled the publication of a Harris endorsement the Post\u2019s editorial board had already written. Two columnists and two members of the editorial board have resigned in the wake of Bezos\u2019 decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,\u201d editorial board member David Hoffman wrote in a letter announcing his exit from the editorial board. \u201cI find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Post reporter David Weigel, who now writes for Semafor, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky that the fact that Bezos personally silenced his own editorial board was an ominous sign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing,\u201d Weigel wrote<\/a>. \u201cThis is five-alarm fire stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis maintains that the decision to not run the endorsement wasn\u2019t due to Bezos\u2019 wishes, but out of the paper\u2019s desire to remain \u201cindependent.\u201d This is despite the Post regularly endorsing candidates in every presidential election dating back to 1976 (with the exception of 1988). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility,\u201d Lewis wrote<\/a>. \u201cThat is inevitable. We don\u2019t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the Post, they have since bled out more than 250,000 subscriptions<\/a> \u2014 which makes up roughly 10% of all subscriptions \u2014 in the last week, as angry readers disinvested from the paper in response to the non-endorsement. Former Post executive editor Marty Baron told NPR that he doubted Lewis\u2019 official explanation for why the Harris endorsement was called off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dIf this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with Dr. Soon-Shiong, Bezos\u2019 reasons may very well be business-related. On the day the Post announced it wouldn\u2019t be endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 election, the Guardian reported that executives of Bezos\u2019 space exploration company, Blue Origin, met with Trump<\/a>. The details of the meeting were not publicly disclosed, though Blue Origin executives may be concerned about protecting the $3.4 billion contract<\/a> they landed with NASA last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan \u2014 who resigned after the non-endorsement \u2014 told the the Daily Beast the fact that the meeting took place the same day the endorsement was called off was not a coincidence<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do \u2013 and then met with the Blue Origin people,\u201d Kagan said. \u201cWhich tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bezos has owned the Post since 2013, and didn\u2019t interfere when the paper endorsed Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president in 2016 and 2020, respectively. But he seems to fear reprisal from the former president, should he be elected to a second term in the form of attacks on his business interests. CNBC reported that in 2019, Amazon lost out to Microsoft<\/a> on a $10 billion cloud computing contract for the Pentagon. A lawsuit filed that year claims that the ex-president used \u201cimproper pressure \u2026 to harm his perceived political enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bezos himself pushed back<\/a> on the suggestion of kowtowing to Trump for business reasons in an op-ed he published in the Post. He insisted that the Blue Origin executive team\u2019s meeting with Trump the same day his paper announced it wasn\u2019t endorsing Harris was pure coincidence, that the decision was \u201centirely internal\u201d and not based on his personal interference, and that he \u201csighed\u201d when finding out about the meeting, knowing how it would be perceived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[N]o quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cThere is no connection between [the meeting] and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Timothy Snyder said it was correct to call Dr. Soon-Shiong\u2019s and Bezos\u2019 interference with their newspapers\u2019 respective editorial boards \u201canticipatory obedience<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOligarchs, the very wealthy people, want to tell us that they\u2019re just \u2018staying out of politics\u2019. But of course, when you stay out of politics in a way that harms democracy, what you are really doing is saying, we, the really wealthy people, are going to be fine in the new post-democratic order,\u201d Snyder said. \u201cWhat they are saying is: after democracy dies in darkness, they\u2019ll be the ones who will be moving happily about in the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bezos and Soon-Shiong aren\u2019t the only billionaire media executives obeying in advance, either. In August, Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg expressed a noticeably warmer attitude toward Trump, and praised his raised-fist response to the July assassination attempt as \u201cone of the most badass things I\u2019ve ever seen in my life<\/a>.\u201d That same month, Politico reported that Trump claimed Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election, and that if he did it again, he would \u201cspend the rest of his life in prison.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A second Trump term will be defined by fascistic acts of vengeance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The former president has made it abundantly clear that the central theme of his second term, should he win the election, would be vengeance. In early 2023, when officially launching his 2024 candidacy for the White House, Trump gave an ominous speech<\/a> to supporters in Waco, Texas (where a bloody standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult occurred), vowing to use the forces of the government to strike back at enemies of his movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am your warrior, I am your justice,\u201d Trump said. \u201cFor those who have been wronged and betrayed \u2026 I am your retribution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This publication has not pulled punches about calling Trump and his movement explicitly fascist, as this author has done in a five-part series<\/a> written between 2021 and 2022. But Occupy.com<\/a>\u2019s characterization of the 2024 Republican presidential nominee as a fascist is now also shared by two four-star generals who worked closely with Trump. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

General Mark Milley, who Trump himself appointed to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, told journalist Bob Woodward that the ex-president was \u201cfascist to the core<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cthe most dangerous person to this country.\u201d In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Milley contacted his counterpart in China to assure him that Trump\u2019s attempts to overturn election results would not be successful. When Trump found out about that call, he suggested that the United States\u2019 top military official should be executed<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Kelly, a Marine general who was Trump\u2019s longest-serving White House chief of staff, recently told the New York Times that his former boss met the basic definition of a fascist<\/a>, and warned that he would govern as a dictator if elected to a second term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, looking at the definition of fascism: It\u2019s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cSo certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kelly also told Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in October that Trump said he wanted \u201cthe kind of generals that Hitler had<\/a>,\u201d because they were \u201ctotally loyal.\u201d He also praised the Nazi dictator, telling Kelly that he thought \u201cHitler did some good things,\u201d and on one occasion asked who the \u201cgood guys\u201d were in World War I. The four-star general told Trump in response that, actually, Hitler\u2019s generals tried to kill him on multiple occasions (like the July 20 plot<\/a>), that it was never acceptable to praise Hitler for anything, and that it was a good general practice for American presidents to always assume the \u201cgood guys\u201d in any war were the US and its allies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has continued to defend his remarks calling Democrats and people who oppose him \u201cthe enemy from within,<\/a>\u201d and even asserts that they are worse than America\u2019s foreign adversaries. This is also a callback to Hitler\u2019s regime: In 2012, the University of Cambridge published a report finding that Hitler once referred to Jewish people as \u201cthe enemy within.\u201d That characterization notably preceded the \u201cFinal Solution\u201d<\/a> in which Hitler signed off on the genocide of millions of Jewish people across Germany and its occupied territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And like the pro-Nazi German American Bund in 1939<\/a>, Trump also held a fascist rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Post\u2019s Philip Bump observed that the Bund rally \u201cbore some striking similarities<\/a>\u201d to Trump\u2019s late October MAGA rally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSpeakers in 1939 lamented government spending, railed against Marxism and complained about how information negative to their allies was \u2018played up and twisted to fan the flames of hate in the hearts of Americans\u2019 by the news media,\u201d Bump wrote. He also reminded readers that Trump advisor Stephen Miller\u2019s claim that \u201cAmerica is for Americans, and Americans only\u201d mirrored Bund national secretary James Wheeler-Hill\u2019s call \u201cto restore America to the true Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether it\u2019s the symbolic fascism of pro-Trump speakers saying the same things at a rally in the same location as avowed Nazis 85 years ago, or the very real, practical fascism that John Kelly and Mark Milley warned about, the fact that the final week of the 2024 election is focused on a national conversation about whether the Republican presidential nominee is a fascist should be alarming to all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find your polling place at vote.org<\/a> and vote on November 5<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron\u2019s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THU, 10\/31\/2024 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON (Occupy.com)\u00a0 According to author and Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, the number-one rule when faced with tyranny is to not obey in advance. \u201cMost of the power in authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37373,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37372\/revisions\/37373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}