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1000 results for “pipe_dreams”
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RE: https://urbanists.social/@Streetsweeper/116341614455296369
Zoning laws do function like this -- they increase car dependence. But that's not all they do. Laws are tools, and tools only very rarely have just one capability. Tools created to solve one problem are often repurposed to solve many others. For instance, hammers were invented hundreds of thousands of years before nails, but now driving nails is a common use of hammers.
Laws are different from hammers in at least one important sense. Almost everyone who has a problem that a hammer can solve has access to hammers and the ability to use them. Laws, on the other hand, can only be created and can only be used by a very small group of people -- the ruling class. [1]
So as in this article, the ruling class uses zoning to increase car dependence because they make money from it in a variety of ways -- car sales, gasoline sales, oil, etc. But car dependence serves other purposes -- it makes people easier to track, to control, etc
And increasing car dependence is not the only ruling class solution provided by zoning. Zoning laws prevent people from running businesses out of their homes, increasing the likelihood that they'll have to work for wages -- without wage laborers capitalism would collapse. Zoning laws also prevent tenants from sharing rentals to the full extent possible, so more rental units get rented. Without a steady supply of tenants the landlord business -- quintessential capitalism -- would collapse.
Zoning laws also allow local governments to take houses away from their putative owners -- can't afford to fix your fences, keep your lawn mowed, keep your house painted, etc, and the city will fine you until you comply. Can't afford to pay? They'll take your house. Eventually it gets sold to someone else and both the city and your mortgage holder make money.
I'm sure that many of these uses weren't foreseeable when modern zoning was invented, but as I said, tools are continually repurposed to solve new problems. Since effectively only the ruling class is able to create laws and to use them effectively they get repurposed for their benefit.
Attributing purposes to tools rather than to those who wield them is a common fallacy, and it leads to serious analytic errors. When people say that the purpose e.g. of police is to protect people and that we just need to get them back to this original use -- in other words advocating for reform -- they're falling into this trap. Look at the capabilities of police, remember that those capabilities can be directed in many ways and only the ruling class is able to decide how the police are used, and it becomes clear that reform is a pipe dream.
#Zoning #ZoningLaws #ACAB #Abolition #Tools #ToolTheory #Capitalism #WageLabor #Landlords
[1] Sometimes people who aren't in the ruling class manage to use laws to their advantage, but these are edge cases. Not only that, but the very possibility of non-rulers using laws serves as one of capitalism's many safety valves. When it does happen it relieves pressure from below and capitalism lives another day. Such cases are also examples of the ruling class using the laws
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RE: https://urbanists.social/@Streetsweeper/116341614455296369
Zoning laws do function like this -- they increase car dependence. But that's not all they do. Laws are tools, and tools only very rarely have just one capability. Tools created to solve one problem are often repurposed to solve many others. For instance, hammers were invented hundreds of thousands of years before nails, but now driving nails is a common use of hammers.
Laws are different from hammers in at least one important sense. Almost everyone who has a problem that a hammer can solve has access to hammers and the ability to use them. Laws, on the other hand, can only be created and can only be used by a very small group of people -- the ruling class. [1]
So as in this article, the ruling class uses zoning to increase car dependence because they make money from it in a variety of ways -- car sales, gasoline sales, oil, etc. But car dependence serves other purposes -- it makes people easier to track, to control, etc
And increasing car dependence is not the only ruling class solution provided by zoning. Zoning laws prevent people from running businesses out of their homes, increasing the likelihood that they'll have to work for wages -- without wage laborers capitalism would collapse. Zoning laws also prevent tenants from sharing rentals to the full extent possible, so more rental units get rented. Without a steady supply of tenants the landlord business -- quintessential capitalism -- would collapse.
Zoning laws also allow local governments to take houses away from their putative owners -- can't afford to fix your fences, keep your lawn mowed, keep your house painted, etc, and the city will fine you until you comply. Can't afford to pay? They'll take your house. Eventually it gets sold to someone else and both the city and your mortgage holder make money.
I'm sure that many of these uses weren't foreseeable when modern zoning was invented, but as I said, tools are continually repurposed to solve new problems. Since effectively only the ruling class is able to create laws and to use them effectively they get repurposed for their benefit.
Attributing purposes to tools rather than to those who wield them is a common fallacy, and it leads to serious analytic errors. When people say that the purpose e.g. of police is to protect people and that we just need to get them back to this original use -- in other words advocating for reform -- they're falling into this trap. Look at the capabilities of police, remember that those capabilities can be directed in many ways and only the ruling class is able to decide how the police are used, and it becomes clear that reform is a pipe dream.
#Zoning #ZoningLaws #ACAB #Abolition #Tools #ToolTheory #Capitalism #WageLabor #Landlords
[1] Sometimes people who aren't in the ruling class manage to use laws to their advantage, but these are edge cases. Not only that, but the very possibility of non-rulers using laws serves as one of capitalism's many safety valves. When it does happen it relieves pressure from below and capitalism lives another day. Such cases are also examples of the ruling class using the laws
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RE: https://urbanists.social/@Streetsweeper/116341614455296369
Zoning laws do function like this -- they increase car dependence. But that's not all they do. Laws are tools, and tools only very rarely have just one capability. Tools created to solve one problem are often repurposed to solve many others. For instance, hammers were invented hundreds of thousands of years before nails, but now driving nails is a common use of hammers.
Laws are different from hammers in at least one important sense. Almost everyone who has a problem that a hammer can solve has access to hammers and the ability to use them. Laws, on the other hand, can only be created and can only be used by a very small group of people -- the ruling class. [1]
So as in this article, the ruling class uses zoning to increase car dependence because they make money from it in a variety of ways -- car sales, gasoline sales, oil, etc. But car dependence serves other purposes -- it makes people easier to track, to control, etc
And increasing car dependence is not the only ruling class solution provided by zoning. Zoning laws prevent people from running businesses out of their homes, increasing the likelihood that they'll have to work for wages -- without wage laborers capitalism would collapse. Zoning laws also prevent tenants from sharing rentals to the full extent possible, so more rental units get rented. Without a steady supply of tenants the landlord business -- quintessential capitalism -- would collapse.
Zoning laws also allow local governments to take houses away from their putative owners -- can't afford to fix your fences, keep your lawn mowed, keep your house painted, etc, and the city will fine you until you comply. Can't afford to pay? They'll take your house. Eventually it gets sold to someone else and both the city and your mortgage holder make money.
I'm sure that many of these uses weren't foreseeable when modern zoning was invented, but as I said, tools are continually repurposed to solve new problems. Since effectively only the ruling class is able to create laws and to use them effectively they get repurposed for their benefit.
Attributing purposes to tools rather than to those who wield them is a common fallacy, and it leads to serious analytic errors. When people say that the purpose e.g. of police is to protect people and that we just need to get them back to this original use -- in other words advocating for reform -- they're falling into this trap. Look at the capabilities of police, remember that those capabilities can be directed in many ways and only the ruling class is able to decide how the police are used, and it becomes clear that reform is a pipe dream.
#Zoning #ZoningLaws #ACAB #Abolition #Tools #ToolTheory #Capitalism #WageLabor #Landlords
[1] Sometimes people who aren't in the ruling class manage to use laws to their advantage, but these are edge cases. Not only that, but the very possibility of non-rulers using laws serves as one of capitalism's many safety valves. When it does happen it relieves pressure from below and capitalism lives another day. Such cases are also examples of the ruling class using the laws
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Bering Strait Tunnel: Russia’s Post-War New Deal Or Geopolitical Mirage?
Bering Strait Tunnel: Russia’s Post-War New Deal Or Geopolitical Mirage?
Russia might still fund some less ambitious infrastructure projects in its Far East-Arctic region to keep the economy hot after the war ends, help veterans find work, and encourage settlement there.
Trump reacted positively to the proposal by Kirill Dmitriev, chief of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and envoy in ongoing negotiations with the US, to build a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. The idea isn’t new but has recently been revived as a means of physically embodying the New Détente that their leaders aim to achieve if they’re first able to end the Ukrainian Conflict. Given its $8-65 billion cost as estimated by Dmitriev himself, however, this megaproject would have to be profitable if it’s to be built.
Therein lies the problem since Russian-US trade has always been low even before the unprecedented sanctions that were imposed after the start of the special operation. Energy and raw materials comprise the vast majority of Russian exports, but the US doesn’t need them since it already has enough of pretty much everything apart from rare earth minerals. About that, while Russia has some untapped rare earth deposits, their yields could easily be exported to the US by sea in the event of a New Détente.
Two Russian experts recently interviewed by publicly financed TASS are of a similar opinion. According to Dmitry Zavyalov, head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Logistics and dean of the Higher School of Economics faculty at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, China might be interested in this megaproject, but “the scale of the costs, their distribution among the project participants, and geopolitical risks reduce the potential benefits.”
Alexander Firanchuk, a leading researcher at the Presidential Academy’s International Laboratory for Foreign Trade Research, pointed out that “Alaska is cut off from the main US rail network, while Chukotka is thousands of kilometers of permafrost and mountains from the nearest Russian rails. Any ‘saving’ of a couple of days’ travel compared to the sea instantly vanishes against the monstrous costs of building thousands of kilometers of new tracks, bridges, and tunnels in the harshest climates on the planet.”
Nevertheless, the aforesaid infrastructure projects might also be what Dmitriev has in mind, perhaps envisaged as a Russian version of FDR’s “New Deal” for keeping the economy hot and helping veterans find work once the war ends. Putin recently approved high-speed rail projects for connecting Moscow with major cities in European Russia, which could be employed to this end, but the tunnel proposal would help develop and settle the Far East-Arctic region per the vision that he shared in September.
Putin also proposed building a new veteran-led Russian elite last year, and some of its most aspirational members could cut their political teeth by working on these projects and then running in regional elections, after which they might rise to national renown. Among the comparatively less aspirational majority, they might be content to live out their lives in the rural Far East-Arctic region after working on projects there, especially if they were traumatized by the war and struggle to reintegrate into society.
With this insight in mind, the Bering Strait tunnel idea that Dmitriev just revived would actually be quite beneficial to Russia, but not for the reasons that many might have assumed. Even so, the total costs of this megaproject and all the associated infrastructure that would have to be built in the Far East-Arctic region would be enormous and arguably beyond the national budget’s means to fund in full, and foreign investors might not consider any of this to be profitable. The tunnel might thus remain a pipe dream.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.
#BeringStraitTunnel #DonaldTrump #FarEast #Geopolitics #Russia #TheArctic #USA
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Bering Strait Tunnel: Russia’s Post-War New Deal Or Geopolitical Mirage?
Bering Strait Tunnel: Russia’s Post-War New Deal Or Geopolitical Mirage?
Russia might still fund some less ambitious infrastructure projects in its Far East-Arctic region to keep the economy hot after the war ends, help veterans find work, and encourage settlement there.
Trump reacted positively to the proposal by Kirill Dmitriev, chief of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and envoy in ongoing negotiations with the US, to build a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. The idea isn’t new but has recently been revived as a means of physically embodying the New Détente that their leaders aim to achieve if they’re first able to end the Ukrainian Conflict. Given its $8-65 billion cost as estimated by Dmitriev himself, however, this megaproject would have to be profitable if it’s to be built.
Therein lies the problem since Russian-US trade has always been low even before the unprecedented sanctions that were imposed after the start of the special operation. Energy and raw materials comprise the vast majority of Russian exports, but the US doesn’t need them since it already has enough of pretty much everything apart from rare earth minerals. About that, while Russia has some untapped rare earth deposits, their yields could easily be exported to the US by sea in the event of a New Détente.
Two Russian experts recently interviewed by publicly financed TASS are of a similar opinion. According to Dmitry Zavyalov, head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Logistics and dean of the Higher School of Economics faculty at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, China might be interested in this megaproject, but “the scale of the costs, their distribution among the project participants, and geopolitical risks reduce the potential benefits.”
Alexander Firanchuk, a leading researcher at the Presidential Academy’s International Laboratory for Foreign Trade Research, pointed out that “Alaska is cut off from the main US rail network, while Chukotka is thousands of kilometers of permafrost and mountains from the nearest Russian rails. Any ‘saving’ of a couple of days’ travel compared to the sea instantly vanishes against the monstrous costs of building thousands of kilometers of new tracks, bridges, and tunnels in the harshest climates on the planet.”
Nevertheless, the aforesaid infrastructure projects might also be what Dmitriev has in mind, perhaps envisaged as a Russian version of FDR’s “New Deal” for keeping the economy hot and helping veterans find work once the war ends. Putin recently approved high-speed rail projects for connecting Moscow with major cities in European Russia, which could be employed to this end, but the tunnel proposal would help develop and settle the Far East-Arctic region per the vision that he shared in September.
Putin also proposed building a new veteran-led Russian elite last year, and some of its most aspirational members could cut their political teeth by working on these projects and then running in regional elections, after which they might rise to national renown. Among the comparatively less aspirational majority, they might be content to live out their lives in the rural Far East-Arctic region after working on projects there, especially if they were traumatized by the war and struggle to reintegrate into society.
With this insight in mind, the Bering Strait tunnel idea that Dmitriev just revived would actually be quite beneficial to Russia, but not for the reasons that many might have assumed. Even so, the total costs of this megaproject and all the associated infrastructure that would have to be built in the Far East-Arctic region would be enormous and arguably beyond the national budget’s means to fund in full, and foreign investors might not consider any of this to be profitable. The tunnel might thus remain a pipe dream.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.
#BeringStraitTunnel #DonaldTrump #FarEast #Geopolitics #Russia #TheArctic #USA
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Cutting out linen for a new shirt today, I started having science-fictional thoughts about the future of low-waste one-off sewing (home sewing, bespoke, etc). I say “science-fictional”, but most of this technology already exists.
What if we could do this:
- I browse a lookbook online, and choose my fabric (maybe via a step where I send off for samples, or view a physical lookbook at my local library or fabric shop or maker space, or perhaps it’s fabric I’ve used previously so I know I like it)
- I go to the fabric-maker’s website, upload SVG files of my pattern pieces with marked grainlines (maybe even marked pattern-match lines), and pay a service+shipping fee plus the retail price for the minimum length of fabric that would be required to cut just those pieces (this is going to be more than the length that is actually used, due to the next step, but I think the buyer needs to commit at this stage in order to make it feasible)
- the fabric-maker merges my SVG shapes with other people’s SVG shapes to create the optimal layout that wastes the least fabric
- fabric shapes are laser-cut, sorted out, then mailed to their recipients along with some of the inevitable offcuts to use for mending in the future
- I sew my shapes together and have clothing
Probably a pipe dream, but I’ve been trying to think of alternatives to “traditional” zero-waste sewing since I’m not super-keen on loose boxy clothes.
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The dawn of urban air mobility and vertiports
We all may soon be witnessing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) zipping across the skies of metropolitan areas around the globe. In 2022, FAA approved vertiport standards for the United States. More recently, plans have been set forth for the development of vertiports in a number of American cities, as well as overseas.
Proposed vertiport on Vas Island in Abu Dhabi – Source: skyports.netThese may be located on ground-based sites or atop buildings and other suitable structures. The ground-breaking differences in urban air mobility will include:
- Quieter operations using electric aircraft
- Zero emissions
- Smaller footprints than traditional airports due to the vertical takeoff/landing ability of the aircraft, though these may be larger than existing heliports.
- Likelihood of future unmanned operations for parcel and freight services.
- Flights at 5,000 feet or below
For city planners, these air mobility facilities (a.k.a. air taxis) will become more and more common as we move further into the second half of the 2020s. And this trend will continue to takeoff numerically over the next several decades. If you think this is just a pipe dream, take note that as of February 2025, more than 1,500 vertiports are currently planned around the globe with approximately 25 percent of those now contracted.
Source: urbanairmobilitynews.comIf your community is home to a commercial or business-related airport, has a dynamic downtown, port facilities, major sport stadiums, or clusters of major business headquarters, major parcel distribution facilities, hospitals, and universities, it will no-doubt become a focus of attention for urban air mobility operations. NOW is definitely the time to begin preparing your master plans and zoning regulations for the dawn of this new age of urban and regional transportation.
Among the many issues to consider for city planners are:
- Ground connections to transit options
- On-site/off-site parking
- Hours of operation
- Landing/takeoff patterns – particularly in relation to other airports and vertiports
- Operation height of aircraft over residential areas – potential sound from rotors
- Lighting
- Landscaping
- Truck traffic for parcel and freight operations
- Emergency services and security
Below are brief summaries of some of the vertiport projects that are open and operational or under development. Peace!
ABU DHABI, UAE
Three (3) vertiports are planned including Yas Island, where the new Disney theme park is planned, Bateen, and Khalifa Port.
Proposed vertiport at Bateen, Abu Dhabi, UAE – Source: skyports.netCHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA
Vertiport Chicago has opened just to the west of The Loop. Electric air taxis, include planned service by United Airlines will initially connect the vertiport with O’Hare International Airport.
United Airlines intends to serve Vertiport Chicago with urban mobility air taxis from Archer Aviation – Source: design boom.com Vertiport Chicago – center of the image“The early launch routes will focus in on airport to city center transportation service, which are referred to as “trunk” routes. Once the trunk routes have been established, the next step will be to build out “branch” routes to connect to surrounding communities.”
Source: vertiportchicago.com
COLOGNE/BONN, GERMANY
Possible sites for a vertiport at the Cologne Bonn Airport – Source: researchgate.netDUBAI, UAE
Four (4) vertiports are planned in Dubai, with the first approved site at Dubai International Airport. This location is to be named Dubai International Vertiport (DXV). Service by commercial air taxis is to begin in 2026.
Concept design for Dubai International Vertiport – Source: aaminternational.comHOUSTON, TEXAS, USA
A proposed urban air mobility network is being developed in the Houston area.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA
Archer Aviation’s proposed air mobility (taxi) network for Los Angeles – Source: investors.archer.comNEW YORK CITY, NY, USA
Downtown Skyport (formerly the downtown Manhattan Heliport).
Downtown NYC Skyport – Source: aaminternational.comORLANDO, FLORIDA, USA
A new vertiport at Orlando International airport is expected to open in 2028.
Proposed Orlando Vertiport – Source: evaint.comOSAKA, JAPAN
Osaka Metro opened its first vertiport (OsakaKo) for demonstrations during the Expo 2025 World’s Fair. Three more vertiports are planned in the metropolitan area.
New OsakaKo Sertiport in Osaka, Japan – Source: alojapan.comROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Vertiport Galileo opened in 2023 as a drone vertiport at Future Mobility Park in Rotterdam.
Vertiport Galileo – Source: porttechnology.orgSAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA
TechPort San Antonio is being developed by Port San Antonio.
Rendering of TechPort San Antonio’s vertiport – Source: portsanantonio.us Source: portsanantonio.usSEBRING, FLORIDA, USA
Even some smaller cities like Sebring are considering the air mobility future. A vertiport is scheduled to be added to the Sebring Regional Airport in 2026 as a mid-state location for connecting to multiple major airports in the Sunshine State.
Testing facilites:
Bicester, England, UK
Pontoise-Cormeilles, France
SOURCES:
- https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-releases-vertiport-design-standards-support-safe-integration-advanced-air-mobility
- https://skyports.net/nycedc-unveils-downtown-skyport-as-new-operator-takes-over-city-owned-heliport/
- https://skyports.net/vertiports/
- https://edc.nyc/press-release/nycedc-announces-new-operator-downtown-manhattan-heliport
- https://www.asdnews.com/news/aerospace/2022/11/11/vertiport-testbed-european-urban-air-mobility-testing-inaugurated-paris
- https://evaint.com/orlando-international-airport-unveils-plans-for-vertiport-to-support-evtol-aircraft-by-2028/
- https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/futureflight/2024-06-26/ferrovial-teams-evtol-operator-urbanlink-develop-florida
- https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220007100/downloads/Vertiport%20Considerations%20Paper%20Final%20v2.pdf
- https://www.urbanairmobilitynews.com/new-city-projects/wisk-shows-plans-for-six-vertiport-houston-city-autonomous-evtol-network/
- https://www.portsanantonio.us/AAM
- https://www.vertiportchicago.com
- https://www.midfloridanewspapers.com/highlands_news-sun/airport-to-build-landing-area-for-eplanes/article_057b235e-6fa7-11ef-9518-f7c4835cf30b.html
- https://www.porttechnology.org/news/first-drone-vertiport-now-operational-in-the-netherlands/
- https://www.alojapan.com/1230012/osaka-metro-completes-vertiport-for-expo-2025/
- https://en.skydrive2020.com/archives/14888
- https://www.urbanairmobilitynews.com/uam-infrastructure/1504-vertiports-now-planned-for-construction-worldwide-latest-global-aam-uam-market-map-report/
- https://www.designboom.com/technology/meet-midnight-evtol-chicago-first-air-taxi-sustainable-low-noise-mobility-03-25-2023/
- https://www.vertiportchicago.com/newsroom
#airMobility #airTaxis #airTraffic #airTravel #airports #aviation #cities #environment #eVTOL #FAA #geography #landUse #planning #transportation #travel #urbanMobilityAircraft #vertiports
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Maybe, it's time to leave #Firefish after all (a couple of weeks ago, it seemed alive and well, but a few bugs are showing up more and more often. Now, it's the search bar that is acting up.
Now the question is where to move? (and this is where my chronic indecisiveness is kicking in)
I have a few options.
1. Stay on Firefish after all.
- Pros: That will save me time and energy. I have a wonderful admin on my instance.
If it's actually actively maintained by the new owners, maybe nice things will come out of it (the automatic language selector seems new and unique to Firefish, right?)
- Cons: There have been bugs appearing lately and they give me bad flashbacks from last year when firefish.social imploded.
A feeling of hanging on to a sinking ship (a sunken ship?)
2. Another #Misskey fork, either #IceShrimp or #Sharkey.
- Pros: Similar to Firefish but more alive I could move all my old posts to the new platform.
- Cons: Well, first, the fact that they're hard to tell apart from each other doesn't help making a choice.
Do I really need that many customization options?
Regarding the question above, one reason I'd like to stick with a Misskey fork is the "channels" function. It's basically a mini-private forum on the instance. And I have the crazy dream of bringing my non-terminally-online friends to the #Fediverse, and that would be awesome if we all shared the same instance, and also have a private section but... And that's a big "but." I tried and I have yet to convince a single one of them to give a shot to this idea. So maybe I'm wasting my hopes with this pipe dream.
Another con for the Misskey forks is that you can't follow hashtags, which is one of my favorite functions on #Mastodon and that is sorely missing on Firefish, IceShrimp, and Sharkey.
3. #Akkoma, especially #Akkomane
- Pros: It's lightweight, it's sleek, and it allows long posts, and following hashtags too.
You can use it with Elk and Phanpy and probably most Fediverse apps (which is not the case for the MissKey forks).
If I want to self-host a solo instance, it's also the cheapest option (it matters, I'm poor these days and with the state of the Japanese economy, I doubt it'll change anytime soon) - of course, I don't have to have a solo instance.
- Cons:
I'd lose all my old posts. Not a terrible issue, but still a negative.
It's a platform I'm not too familiar with, which is only a problem for the short term, and it seems stable and reliable long term.
Also, it's silly, but I really dislike the default color of the UI (light magenta?) and I don't think I can change it. Of course, I don't have to use the default UI as I can use another app with it, but for some reason, I tend to like using the default interface when I use it on my computer (which remains the place where I use social media the most).
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Last Week Today! S2024E1&2
In the tradition of those of us who can’t do the daily “my day be like” journaling posts, there’s the tradition of the weekly post that sums up what happened the week before. In my nod to one of my favorite TV shows, Last Week Tonight, I’m swashbuckling (🏴☠️) the hell out their title and using it on this blog series. Shiver me timbers! And, I’m ripping off my buddy James with the formatting here. Walk the plank!) Also I’m late AF as two whole weeks of January already passed. GyattDayum 2024 is already faster than ’23. OK, let’s dive in.
🎄So Xmas came and went with little fanfare other than the usual merriment of a Japanese/Afro-American family with very little time and money can make on such occasions. We exchanged gifts with each other, everyone got generally what they wanted but most of all just was glad to be able to enjoy time off with each other, my mom and oldest brother.
🛣️ Big Ass Hank (our RV) got some time on the road — we hustled down to Orlando for some R&R in a warmer place than metro Atlanta. We used our Boondockers Welcome privileges for a nice layover spot in Live Oak, FL when traffic got too much and continued on down the next day. Normally this is a 6 hour drive, but sometime between 2008 and now, about 5 million more people decided to move into the space between us and Central Florida, making I-75 look like a 320 mile urban expressway complete with crack-ups and speed traps every 20 miles. A train between ATL and ORL is needed.
👨👩👧👦 Once in Orlando, we kinda didn’t do much except be in awe of our campsite on Lake Dora (a COUNTY park with cheap camping that blows some of the really expensive sites away) and Old Town Orlando’s Eola Park area. Orlando is a nice town even if you’re not visiting the theme parks; worth the visit just to hang out and chill for 2 days.
👨🏾💻 I actually only took a few days off for the holiday; my on-call shift usually has nothing going on this time of year and I work from home. But there were some bonkers edge cases coming into my queue and I really wish I could talk…vent about them here. I’m compiling them elsewhere, and someday dammit…someday I’m gonna sing like Dionne Warwick!
😷 Of course in the middle of all this, my entire household got sick! It wasn’t COVID but, that didn’t stop my doctor from probing my schnoz…
🎌 There’s lots of Japanese related stores around our part of Atlanta, and we kinda never visit them… So since the kiddos had their Xmas/お年玉 money burning holes in their pockets, we decided to check out Tokyo Kuma (which seemingly got TikTok’d and Instagrammed to death in the last 4 months) and Kinokuniya Atlanta (which has been a 20 year pipe dream ’til now because I swear they were 6 months from opening a location in Buckhead in 1999, but it didn’t happen. Were those just rumors?) Needless to say, I’m glad these are a little out of the way for me, else I’d be treating it like the Daiso or DonKi I so miss and desparately want over here.
🚊 I’ve decided to try my best to advocate officially for bringing a good transport solution to at least my part of Atlanta and Northern Georgia. The ATLTrains concept along with Beltline Lightrail and I-285 BRT concepts need to be combined somehow. Going down to central Florida and seeing Brightline along with SunRail, Lynx and the fledgling but strong grassroots changes in THAT area makes me think we still have a fighting chance up here. And Atlanta ain’t doing nothing but getting bigger. It’s high time we all started thinking regionally and collectively about solutions not just involving 2 ton machines on asphalt all the time.
And that kinda catches us up! If you read this far, you’ve got stamina. Or you’re just really bored. Either way, thank you and see ya next week!
-
CW: Robert Reich nails it on the head once again. The media that treat the GOP as a regular political party are delusional and stuck in the past--or are they just enabling the sabotage of our democracy by the obscenely wealthy. Hard to say about that one. Nevertheless, his point that the GOP is full-on authoritarian and anti-democracy is where we are right now. When the media employs "bothsidesism" or treats the GOP like a legitimate political party that supports democracy, they continue to disinform the American people about what is happening.
Far too many Americans aren't aware of how far the GOP has gone down the road of authoritarianism while abandoning democracy and this is mostly the media's fault. Is the media blind and delusional in not seeing what is right in front of their eyes, too cowardly or profit-oriented to rock the boat or are they complicit in this lurch away from democracy? Either way, our democracy hangs in the balance and it is long past time to call the GOP what it is. The party that wants to kill democracy, serve only the obscenely wealthy and help them get their serfs back.
Goodbye, CNN's Chris Licht. But what's the lesson? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-cnns-chris-licht-but-whats?
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#TheRichOwnTheMedia"CNN sought to move to a "center" that no longer exists
ROBERT REICHAs I predicted yesterday, Chris Licht is out at CNN.
David Zaslav — CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN — delivered the news this morning to CNN staff, noting that Licht’s job "was never going to be easy" and that Licht had "poured his heart and soul into it."
What should CNN or any other media enterprise learn from this debacle?
The lesson is that Licht’s goal of shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined political center was doomed from the start, because there is no longer a political center.
For years now — since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995 — Americans have been moving toward either authoritarianism or democracy.
The old political center of “liberal” Republicans like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller and “conservative” Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman (and, some would say, Bill Clinton) has been disappearing.
Before Newt there had been stirrings of rightwing fascism — led by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and by George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1960s.
But Newt turned the growing anger of the non-college white working class into the beginnings of an authoritarian political movement that would undergird the Republican Party for the next thirty years.
By 2016, Donald Trump was helpful to anyone who still had trouble making the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. Trump required they take sides.
Chris Licht’s predecessor at CNN was Jeff Zucker, who understood that the only big pool of viewers available to CNN were those who still believed in democracy. Zucker competed mightily with MSNBC for them.
Trump was helpful to Zucker in the same way he was helpful to Americans who had trouble making the choice. Trump forced viewers to choose between Fox News and the alternative, thereby giving Zucker’s CNN a fitting nemesis.
CNN’s new management came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment — including Warner Bros Discovery billionaire John Malone — hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s Trump town hall should have erased them.
What especially confused Chris Licht and the rest of CNN’s management was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. They assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
That’s where most Americans want the nation to be."
-
CW: Robert Reich nails it on the head once again. The media that treat the GOP as a regular political party are delusional and stuck in the past--or are they just enabling the sabotage of our democracy by the obscenely wealthy. Hard to say about that one. Nevertheless, his point that the GOP is full-on authoritarian and anti-democracy is where we are right now. When the media employs "bothsidesism" or treats the GOP like a legitimate political party that supports democracy, they continue to disinform the American people about what is happening.
Far too many Americans aren't aware of how far the GOP has gone down the road of authoritarianism while abandoning democracy and this is mostly the media's fault. Is the media blind and delusional in not seeing what is right in front of their eyes, too cowardly or profit-oriented to rock the boat or are they complicit in this lurch away from democracy? Either way, our democracy hangs in the balance and it is long past time to call the GOP what it is. The party that wants to kill democracy, serve only the obscenely wealthy and help them get their serfs back.
Goodbye, CNN's Chris Licht. But what's the lesson? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-cnns-chris-licht-but-whats?
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#TheRichOwnTheMedia"CNN sought to move to a "center" that no longer exists
ROBERT REICHAs I predicted yesterday, Chris Licht is out at CNN.
David Zaslav — CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN — delivered the news this morning to CNN staff, noting that Licht’s job "was never going to be easy" and that Licht had "poured his heart and soul into it."
What should CNN or any other media enterprise learn from this debacle?
The lesson is that Licht’s goal of shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined political center was doomed from the start, because there is no longer a political center.
For years now — since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995 — Americans have been moving toward either authoritarianism or democracy.
The old political center of “liberal” Republicans like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller and “conservative” Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman (and, some would say, Bill Clinton) has been disappearing.
Before Newt there had been stirrings of rightwing fascism — led by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and by George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1960s.
But Newt turned the growing anger of the non-college white working class into the beginnings of an authoritarian political movement that would undergird the Republican Party for the next thirty years.
By 2016, Donald Trump was helpful to anyone who still had trouble making the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. Trump required they take sides.
Chris Licht’s predecessor at CNN was Jeff Zucker, who understood that the only big pool of viewers available to CNN were those who still believed in democracy. Zucker competed mightily with MSNBC for them.
Trump was helpful to Zucker in the same way he was helpful to Americans who had trouble making the choice. Trump forced viewers to choose between Fox News and the alternative, thereby giving Zucker’s CNN a fitting nemesis.
CNN’s new management came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment — including Warner Bros Discovery billionaire John Malone — hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s Trump town hall should have erased them.
What especially confused Chris Licht and the rest of CNN’s management was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. They assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
That’s where most Americans want the nation to be."
-
CW: Robert Reich nails it on the head once again. The media that treat the GOP as a regular political party are delusional and stuck in the past--or are they just enabling the sabotage of our democracy by the obscenely wealthy. Hard to say about that one. Nevertheless, his point that the GOP is full-on authoritarian and anti-democracy is where we are right now. When the media employs "bothsidesism" or treats the GOP like a legitimate political party that supports democracy, they continue to disinform the American people about what is happening.
Far too many Americans aren't aware of how far the GOP has gone down the road of authoritarianism while abandoning democracy and this is mostly the media's fault. Is the media blind and delusional in not seeing what is right in front of their eyes, too cowardly or profit-oriented to rock the boat or are they complicit in this lurch away from democracy? Either way, our democracy hangs in the balance and it is long past time to call the GOP what it is. The party that wants to kill democracy, serve only the obscenely wealthy and help them get their serfs back.
Goodbye, CNN's Chris Licht. But what's the lesson? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-cnns-chris-licht-but-whats?
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#TheRichOwnTheMedia"CNN sought to move to a "center" that no longer exists
ROBERT REICHAs I predicted yesterday, Chris Licht is out at CNN.
David Zaslav — CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN — delivered the news this morning to CNN staff, noting that Licht’s job "was never going to be easy" and that Licht had "poured his heart and soul into it."
What should CNN or any other media enterprise learn from this debacle?
The lesson is that Licht’s goal of shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined political center was doomed from the start, because there is no longer a political center.
For years now — since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995 — Americans have been moving toward either authoritarianism or democracy.
The old political center of “liberal” Republicans like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller and “conservative” Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman (and, some would say, Bill Clinton) has been disappearing.
Before Newt there had been stirrings of rightwing fascism — led by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and by George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1960s.
But Newt turned the growing anger of the non-college white working class into the beginnings of an authoritarian political movement that would undergird the Republican Party for the next thirty years.
By 2016, Donald Trump was helpful to anyone who still had trouble making the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. Trump required they take sides.
Chris Licht’s predecessor at CNN was Jeff Zucker, who understood that the only big pool of viewers available to CNN were those who still believed in democracy. Zucker competed mightily with MSNBC for them.
Trump was helpful to Zucker in the same way he was helpful to Americans who had trouble making the choice. Trump forced viewers to choose between Fox News and the alternative, thereby giving Zucker’s CNN a fitting nemesis.
CNN’s new management came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment — including Warner Bros Discovery billionaire John Malone — hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s Trump town hall should have erased them.
What especially confused Chris Licht and the rest of CNN’s management was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. They assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
That’s where most Americans want the nation to be."
-
CW: Robert Reich nails it on the head once again. The media that treat the GOP as a regular political party are delusional and stuck in the past--or are they just enabling the sabotage of our democracy by the obscenely wealthy. Hard to say about that one. Nevertheless, his point that the GOP is full-on authoritarian and anti-democracy is where we are right now. When the media employs "bothsidesism" or treats the GOP like a legitimate political party that supports democracy, they continue to disinform the American people about what is happening.
Far too many Americans aren't aware of how far the GOP has gone down the road of authoritarianism while abandoning democracy and this is mostly the media's fault. Is the media blind and delusional in not seeing what is right in front of their eyes, too cowardly or profit-oriented to rock the boat or are they complicit in this lurch away from democracy? Either way, our democracy hangs in the balance and it is long past time to call the GOP what it is. The party that wants to kill democracy, serve only the obscenely wealthy and help them get their serfs back.
Goodbye, CNN's Chris Licht. But what's the lesson? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-cnns-chris-licht-but-whats?
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#TheRichOwnTheMedia"CNN sought to move to a "center" that no longer exists
ROBERT REICHAs I predicted yesterday, Chris Licht is out at CNN.
David Zaslav — CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN — delivered the news this morning to CNN staff, noting that Licht’s job "was never going to be easy" and that Licht had "poured his heart and soul into it."
What should CNN or any other media enterprise learn from this debacle?
The lesson is that Licht’s goal of shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined political center was doomed from the start, because there is no longer a political center.
For years now — since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995 — Americans have been moving toward either authoritarianism or democracy.
The old political center of “liberal” Republicans like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller and “conservative” Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman (and, some would say, Bill Clinton) has been disappearing.
Before Newt there had been stirrings of rightwing fascism — led by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and by George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1960s.
But Newt turned the growing anger of the non-college white working class into the beginnings of an authoritarian political movement that would undergird the Republican Party for the next thirty years.
By 2016, Donald Trump was helpful to anyone who still had trouble making the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. Trump required they take sides.
Chris Licht’s predecessor at CNN was Jeff Zucker, who understood that the only big pool of viewers available to CNN were those who still believed in democracy. Zucker competed mightily with MSNBC for them.
Trump was helpful to Zucker in the same way he was helpful to Americans who had trouble making the choice. Trump forced viewers to choose between Fox News and the alternative, thereby giving Zucker’s CNN a fitting nemesis.
CNN’s new management came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment — including Warner Bros Discovery billionaire John Malone — hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s Trump town hall should have erased them.
What especially confused Chris Licht and the rest of CNN’s management was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. They assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
That’s where most Americans want the nation to be."
-
CW: Robert Reich nails it on the head once again. The media that treat the GOP as a regular political party are delusional and stuck in the past--or are they just enabling the sabotage of our democracy by the obscenely wealthy. Hard to say about that one. Nevertheless, his point that the GOP is full-on authoritarian and anti-democracy is where we are right now. When the media employs "bothsidesism" or treats the GOP like a legitimate political party that supports democracy, they continue to disinform the American people about what is happening.
Far too many Americans aren't aware of how far the GOP has gone down the road of authoritarianism while abandoning democracy and this is mostly the media's fault. Is the media blind and delusional in not seeing what is right in front of their eyes, too cowardly or profit-oriented to rock the boat or are they complicit in this lurch away from democracy? Either way, our democracy hangs in the balance and it is long past time to call the GOP what it is. The party that wants to kill democracy, serve only the obscenely wealthy and help them get their serfs back.
Goodbye, CNN's Chris Licht. But what's the lesson? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-cnns-chris-licht-but-whats?
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#TheRichOwnTheMedia"CNN sought to move to a "center" that no longer exists
ROBERT REICHAs I predicted yesterday, Chris Licht is out at CNN.
David Zaslav — CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN — delivered the news this morning to CNN staff, noting that Licht’s job "was never going to be easy" and that Licht had "poured his heart and soul into it."
What should CNN or any other media enterprise learn from this debacle?
The lesson is that Licht’s goal of shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined political center was doomed from the start, because there is no longer a political center.
For years now — since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995 — Americans have been moving toward either authoritarianism or democracy.
The old political center of “liberal” Republicans like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller and “conservative” Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman (and, some would say, Bill Clinton) has been disappearing.
Before Newt there had been stirrings of rightwing fascism — led by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and by George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1960s.
But Newt turned the growing anger of the non-college white working class into the beginnings of an authoritarian political movement that would undergird the Republican Party for the next thirty years.
By 2016, Donald Trump was helpful to anyone who still had trouble making the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. Trump required they take sides.
Chris Licht’s predecessor at CNN was Jeff Zucker, who understood that the only big pool of viewers available to CNN were those who still believed in democracy. Zucker competed mightily with MSNBC for them.
Trump was helpful to Zucker in the same way he was helpful to Americans who had trouble making the choice. Trump forced viewers to choose between Fox News and the alternative, thereby giving Zucker’s CNN a fitting nemesis.
CNN’s new management came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment — including Warner Bros Discovery billionaire John Malone — hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s Trump town hall should have erased them.
What especially confused Chris Licht and the rest of CNN’s management was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. They assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
That’s where most Americans want the nation to be."
-
DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025
Image courtesy of DUKWhen you think about the cultural landscape of Serbia, it’s far too easy to get tunnel vision and focus solely on Belgrade. But if you’ve been paying attention to the cracks in the pavement and the vibrant colors crawling up the grey concrete of the provinces, you know that the real revolution has been brewing elsewhere. Specifically, in Čačak. For a decade now, the DUK (Dani Urbane Kulture) Festival has been rewriting the DNA of this town. To celebrate this milestone, they’ve released DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025, a monograph that simultaneously serves as a victory lap and pure example of community building. Right off the bat, the physical presence of this book immediately grabs attention. It’s a remarkable red hardback with the DUK logo imprinted on the front. It feels significant, heavy in the hand like a brick pulled from a crumbling wall, but instead of being a weapon of destruction, it’s a tool of documentation and reconstruction. Inside, the design is flawlessly executed. We often talk about easy-to-read books, but here, the layout actually helps the narrative flow. It’s a chronological journey that guides you through the evolution of an idea, from a small group of enthusiasts with a dream to a full-scale cultural movement that has turned Čačak into one of the most significant street art hubs in the Balkan region. The aesthetic is clean, professional, and yet maintains that street edge that reminds you where this all started.
The heart of this book lies in full-color shots of murals that literally changed the face of the town. But, while the primary focus is on the murals, you’ll also notice many photos dedicated to the people who contributed to the cause in one way or another. It captures that specific, lightning-in-a-bottle energy of their decade-long campaign that actually worked because the community believed in it. It documents the transition of neglected, decaying urban spaces into a massive open-air gallery that now features more than 130 murals. What I love about this monograph is how it refuses to be just a pretty picture book. It’s an in-depth look at the significance of graffiti art and its socio-cultural impact. It explains how DUK emerged from a desperate need for urban creativity and solidarity in a place that could have easily succumbed to the Rust Belt apathy seen in many post-industrial towns. By including the festival lineups over the years, the book also acts as a historical record of the music that soundtracked this change. You see the names, you remember the nights, and you realize that this was a planned intervention. It’s a story of how youth enthusiasm can overcome institutional stagnation through sheer force of will and a collective DIY mentality.
The book excels at showing the behind-the-scenes reality of the festival. It’s one thing to see a finished mural that looks world-class, but it’s another to see the scaffolding, the buckets of paint, and the locals stopping to chat with artists who flew halfway across the world to paint a wall in Central Serbia. This monograph celebrates the work, volunteering, and shared contribution that made it all possible. It’s a celebration of ten years of urban culture, and honestly, it makes me wonder what the next ten will look like. DUK gave this town a new identity, and this book is the definitive visual proof of that legacy. It’s a mandatory addition to the library of anyone who still believes that art can change the world, or at least, the world within their own city limits. Beyond the visuals, the text provides a necessary context for why this matters. In 2015, the idea of hosting a massive urban culture festival in Čačak might have seemed like a pipe dream. Fast forward to 2025, and the town is a destination. The book tracks this progress with its intentional, profound, chronological pacing. It highlights the importance of international cooperation, showing how artists from different continents brought their unique perspectives to the Serbian streets. This exchange of ideas is what keeps a scene from becoming stagnant, and the DUK team clearly understood this from day one. The monograph honors that spirit of openness and global connection, demonstrating that even a local cause can have a global resonance.
The inclusion of the festival lineups is a particularly nice touch for the music nerds among us. It allows you to trace the shifting trends in indie, alternative, electronic, and underground music over the last decade, from the heights of hardcore and punk rock to the rise of electronic and hip-hop influences that have permeated the DUK stages. It also serves as a rock-solid proof that music and visual art are inseparable in the world of urban culture. DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025 exemplifies the power of the community, and that’s everything possible when there are people to stand behind the good cause. The houses, communal buildings, and abandoned spaces of yesterday are the galleries of today because a group of people decided that good enough wasn’t good enough. As you close the red hardback cover and look at that imprinted logo one last time, you’re left with the feeling that this is exactly what cultural change looks like. It’s messy, colorful, loud, and thanks to this monograph, it is now immortalized for the next generation of enthusiasts with spray cans and big ideas to follow.
Order DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025 directly through festival’s Instagram page by clicking HERE
#ALTERNATIVE #BOOK #BOOKS #DANIURBANEKULTURE #DOCUMENTARY #DUK #ELECTRONICMUSIC #ELECTRONICA #GRAFITTIART #HARDCORE #HIPHOP #INDIE #LITERATURE #MUSIC #PUNKROCK #REVIEW #REVIEWS #STREETART -
DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025
Image courtesy of DUKWhen you think about the cultural landscape of Serbia, it’s far too easy to get tunnel vision and focus solely on Belgrade. But if you’ve been paying attention to the cracks in the pavement and the vibrant colors crawling up the grey concrete of the provinces, you know that the real revolution has been brewing elsewhere. Specifically, in Čačak. For a decade now, the DUK (Dani Urbane Kulture) Festival has been rewriting the DNA of this town. To celebrate this milestone, they’ve released DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025, a monograph that simultaneously serves as a victory lap and pure example of community building. Right off the bat, the physical presence of this book immediately grabs attention. It’s a remarkable red hardback with the DUK logo imprinted on the front. It feels significant, heavy in the hand like a brick pulled from a crumbling wall, but instead of being a weapon of destruction, it’s a tool of documentation and reconstruction. Inside, the design is flawlessly executed. We often talk about easy-to-read books, but here, the layout actually helps the narrative flow. It’s a chronological journey that guides you through the evolution of an idea, from a small group of enthusiasts with a dream to a full-scale cultural movement that has turned Čačak into one of the most significant street art hubs in the Balkan region. The aesthetic is clean, professional, and yet maintains that street edge that reminds you where this all started.
The heart of this book lies in full-color shots of murals that literally changed the face of the town. But, while the primary focus is on the murals, you’ll also notice many photos dedicated to the people who contributed to the cause in one way or another. It captures that specific, lightning-in-a-bottle energy of their decade-long campaign that actually worked because the community believed in it. It documents the transition of neglected, decaying urban spaces into a massive open-air gallery that now features more than 130 murals. What I love about this monograph is how it refuses to be just a pretty picture book. It’s an in-depth look at the significance of graffiti art and its socio-cultural impact. It explains how DUK emerged from a desperate need for urban creativity and solidarity in a place that could have easily succumbed to the Rust Belt apathy seen in many post-industrial towns. By including the festival lineups over the years, the book also acts as a historical record of the music that soundtracked this change. You see the names, you remember the nights, and you realize that this was a planned intervention. It’s a story of how youth enthusiasm can overcome institutional stagnation through sheer force of will and a collective DIY mentality.
The book excels at showing the behind-the-scenes reality of the festival. It’s one thing to see a finished mural that looks world-class, but it’s another to see the scaffolding, the buckets of paint, and the locals stopping to chat with artists who flew halfway across the world to paint a wall in Central Serbia. This monograph celebrates the work, volunteering, and shared contribution that made it all possible. It’s a celebration of ten years of urban culture, and honestly, it makes me wonder what the next ten will look like. DUK gave this town a new identity, and this book is the definitive visual proof of that legacy. It’s a mandatory addition to the library of anyone who still believes that art can change the world, or at least, the world within their own city limits. Beyond the visuals, the text provides a necessary context for why this matters. In 2015, the idea of hosting a massive urban culture festival in Čačak might have seemed like a pipe dream. Fast forward to 2025, and the town is a destination. The book tracks this progress with its intentional, profound, chronological pacing. It highlights the importance of international cooperation, showing how artists from different continents brought their unique perspectives to the Serbian streets. This exchange of ideas is what keeps a scene from becoming stagnant, and the DUK team clearly understood this from day one. The monograph honors that spirit of openness and global connection, demonstrating that even a local cause can have a global resonance.
The inclusion of the festival lineups is a particularly nice touch for the music nerds among us. It allows you to trace the shifting trends in indie, alternative, electronic, and underground music over the last decade, from the heights of hardcore and punk rock to the rise of electronic and hip-hop influences that have permeated the DUK stages. It also serves as a rock-solid proof that music and visual art are inseparable in the world of urban culture. DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025 exemplifies the power of the community, and that’s everything possible when there are people to stand behind the good cause. The houses, communal buildings, and abandoned spaces of yesterday are the galleries of today because a group of people decided that good enough wasn’t good enough. As you close the red hardback cover and look at that imprinted logo one last time, you’re left with the feeling that this is exactly what cultural change looks like. It’s messy, colorful, loud, and thanks to this monograph, it is now immortalized for the next generation of enthusiasts with spray cans and big ideas to follow.
Order DUK: Dani Urbane Kulture 2015×2025 directly through festival’s Instagram page by clicking HERE
#ALTERNATIVE #BOOK #BOOKS #DANIURBANEKULTURE #DOCUMENTARY #DUK #ELECTRONICMUSIC #ELECTRONICA #GRAFITTIART #HARDCORE #HIPHOP #INDIE #LITERATURE #MUSIC #PUNKROCK #REVIEW #REVIEWS #STREETART -
US Zionist War Crimes & Iran War: Pax Judaica vs Pax Islamica – The Myth of Muslim Sovereignty!
The Myth of Muslim Sovereignty | Farah El-Sharif | Sermons at the Court | 4 MAR 2026
The end of the Sykes-Picot, ruse-based order is now firmly here: but there is a choice on what comes next. A restoration of true sovereignty, or the triumph of Pax Judaica?
“Woe to the Arabs from the great evil that is nearly approaching them”
– Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
[Sahih al-Bukhari 7059
– Afflictions and the End of the World]—
The Ottoman jihad proclamation against Russia, France and the United Kingdom. ‘Die Türkei und Deutschland’ illustration adapted from a painting by Georg Macco (1863-1933). Source: Making War, Mapping Europe.If it be no discourtesy to Arab amirs
Let this “Indian infidel” dare to speak
Who were the people whom at first God’s Apostle preached kinship close?
Division amongst them was infused, by men like Abu Lahab and such foes
Their existence does not rest at all, on borders long and deserts vast
Arabian lands subsist because of blessings of Arabiaʹs Prophet Last
= Allama Iqbal,
To the Amirs of Arabia,
Zarb-e-KaleemMUSLIM sovereignty is a myth.
It has not existed for over a century.
Since the early 20th century, even jihad campaigns have been sanctioned by—or coopted by—colonial powers.
In World War I, Germany prompted the Ottoman Empire to declare jihad by inciting rebellion among Muslim populations in British, French, and Russian territories. The November 1914 proclamation was labeled “jihad made in Germany.”
During the 1979–1989 Soviet-Afghan War, America supported a decade-long resistance campaign against Soviet forces invading by Afghan mujahidin. They provided extensive covert support to the Afghan mujahidin against “atheist” communist Soviets.
Today, this long tradition of colonially blessed jihads continue. The Wahhabi cleric Saleh al-Fawzan of Saudi Arabia has declared that “our soldiers who are guarding our borders [against Iran with the American soldiers] are performing a noble act of jihad for Allah’s sake.”
If sovereignty means the ability to act independently in defense of one’s people, territory, and moral convictions, then most of the Muslim world does not possess it.
The liberation struggles from direct colonization in the first half of the 20th century in places like Algeria were true and real. Their struggles did not go in vain. They provide lasting lessons and inspiration for the role of Islam in fighting injustice and tyranny. In fact, if anything, “the land of the two million martyrs” stands as a timeless historical witness on us not to let their valiant anti-colonial sacrifices go in vain.
But the painful truth is, as soon as the flags were designed, the anthems were composed, the national border lines were drawn, the colonial administrators only lowered their guns for the mentally colonized state overseers in tailored suits to take their place.
Ultimately, colonial architecture in Muslim societies persisted, but in increasingly ambiguous forms. Harder to detect. Reptilian. Islamophobic, secular, but coopts Muslim symbols to gain legitimacy and control.
As such, “post”colonial Muslim states were never truly free, because repression hid behind the facade of sovereignty that was never really there. Absent the Caliphate, even the concept of an “Arab nation state” will always remain an artificial, fickle construct.
We forget that we still inhabit a Sykes-Picot world. Since 1916, Britain and France partitioned Ottoman-controlled Arab lands into zones of influence that would shape the modern “Middle East” as know it. Carved from the remains of the Caliphate, balkanized Muslim states would eventually be ruled by Westernized puppet monarchs, secularists, butchers, and tyrants.
When they did try to preserve a modicum of sovereignty , like Mossadegh did when he attempted to seize control of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which is now BP) and rejecting Western control over Iranian resources, he was swiftly overthrown and a puppet monarch returned with greatly expanded autocratic powers.
When countries do attempt to preserve a semblance of sovereignty, as is the case of Libya, Syria, Yemen or Iran, they become ravaged by internal division, crippling sanctions and devastating internal and external repression. This is not to romanticize any of these governments. Each had their internal injustices, contradictions, and brutal excesses. But that is precisely the point. The global disorder never even allowed these countries the smallest latitude to internally reform, to breathe. They would rather see a failed, fractured, collapsed, weak repressive state than any hint of deviation from the prescribed limits of subservience, making even the idea of a Muslim sovereign state a pipe dream, an impossibility.
Now, arguably the last dam against the ambitions of Pax Judaica, the Islamic Republic of Iran is being brazenly attacked. Straight out of the Gaza playbook, Israel attacks the children first in a double tap killing 165 school girls. Yet another bloody, senseless blood orgy by the Epstein administration in Washington and Tel Aviv. Another chapter in the decades-long onslaught against Islam and Muslim populations.
But these tactics are not new. Israel’s modus operandi has always been the targeting and killing children. Many do not know of the Bahr el-Baqar primary school massacre in an Egyptian village south of Port Said. It was bombed by the Israeli Air Force on 8 April 1970. Of the 130 children who were attending the school, 46 were killed and over 50 wounded.
Bahr el-Baqar primary school massacre, Alahram, 1970.This “War on Terror,” aka. the war on Islam, has been so relentless, so polarizing, so effective in its spiritual colonization, that today, some diaspora Iranians are even celebrating Israel’s invasion and bloodshed of their fellow countrymen, women and children.
The war on Iran points to the hysteria over the mere existence of any form of a strong “Islamic government” and how pervasive internalized Islamophobia has become: this global dis-order will not tolerate any sovereign Muslim state that speaks in civilizational rather than secular-liberal terms without getting flogged immediately by demonization, sanctions, and now, indiscriminate bombardment and mass killings. And this is beyond Sunni-Shi’a at this point: Israel boasts that it is coming for the predominantly Sunni nation Turkey next.
Only Israel is allowed to invoke their status as “God’s chosen people” as they defile the laws of God. Only Israel can base its policies on biblical, messianic references and doomsday prophecies as it pillages and kills innocents. CNN casually reported that the timing of the attacks on Iran coincides with the period leading up to Purim, “which commemorates the Jewish people’s deliverance from a genocidal plot in ancient Persia.”
Baal, mentioned in the Epstein files, was burned in the streets of Tehran two weeks ago to protest the Epstein administrations’ warmongering as a show of defiance.Today, much like the “jihad made in Germany”, Arab and Gulf states now find themselves in a painfully poetic bare faced exposure of having to wage a jihad against Iran for the sole benefit of Greater Israel. They decry the Iranian attacks on their “sovereign” US military bases (an oxymoron if there ever was one) as “senseless,” “destabilizing.” But are they? If the Gaza genocide was not enough of a wake up call, what else will it take to break the veneer of false sovereignty and sedation that lulls Muslim masses?
If these “sovereign” Arab states truly cared about their safety, why did they allow themselves to become vassal states for foreign military bases in the first place?
Not only that, their armies were too busy crushing internal dissent, but not occupiers. The boots of their military police and mukhabarat gestapos descend not upon those who annex land and bomb hospitals, rather upon the necks of their own people: students, workers, mothers, and journalists who are criminalized for calling a spade a spade. Their batons fracture skulls at home, but protect European colonizers in bomb shelters in Jerusalem. Their rifles are aimed not at mercenaries invading al-Aqsa, but at the chests of their own countrymen. The Arab security state was never free. It sows ethnic, tribal, and class antagonisms, inflaming fault lines to prevent unity because it is perpetually afraid.
Now, they tried to delay the inevitable in the name of preserving their “stability,” but the sin of abandoning Gaza has ushered in an uncharted era of instability. The warpath will leave no one unscathed. The missiles flying over Arab capitals in the past few days have firmly broken the myth of Muslim sovereignty. They are a clarion call to end the double occupation of Muslim lands that do the bidding of external, foreign occupations, as well as the internal occupation that feeds on the stench of our fear, cowardice and total submission.
I’ve said it several times before: the Muslim armies that did not move for Palestine will move against their own people. We see this happening very clearly through the intercepted rockets that are now raining down on Jordanian citizens on behalf of the ambitions of Greater Israel.
An army that fails to defend its own people is not a national institution: it becomes merely a security subcontractor.
Similarly, military bases dot the Gulf in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain and Qatar. The longstanding security coordination defines the treasonous, reptilian, political architecture of the region. Intelligence sharing flows more freely than solidarity. “Muslim resistance” is a concept more loathed more than Zionisim. Words like “jihadist” or “Islamic” have become criminal slurs, punishable by death.
Yet titles such as “His Majesty” and “His Supreme Eminence”—vestiges of European divine-right monarchies—are treated as sacred cows. Perfectly manicured royal portraits adorn ministries and schools. The state trains its citizens not merely to obey, but to revere, almost worship, as we have seen some literally do: this UAE general proudly boasted, “They should listen to Mohammed bin Zayed, he is our guidance, we worship him” (!)
News flash to loyal monarchists and diehard Arab nationalists: no matter how innocent you think your allegiances to king and country are, shirk (polytheism) is the greatest sin in the eyes of Allah. The twain loyalties cannot exist in the heart of a believer. After all, “Allah does not place two hearts in any person’s chest.” (Al-Ahzab: 4)
Those same colonially-constructed states which speak of “sovereignty” host foreign troops, align their strategic doctrine with Washington, and normalize relations with Tel Aviv.
This is nothing but Muslim vassalage. Make no mistake, however painfully this system breaks, the ummah only stands to benefit.
This century long vassalage system produced the endemic moral paralysis and genocidal stalemate we are now in. This system of vassalage has allowed itself to be controlled by the Epstein class of pedophiles and cannibalists who kill children for fun, whether in a school in Gaza or a school in Iran or Yemen.
We have reached the most humiliating point in the history of Islam and colonialism: now, Netanyahu and Trump’s Pax Judaica, is being enforced by Arab countries who prefer perpetual external vassalage and submission to sovereignty, dignity and honor.
Since 1948, there were moments—brief, fragile windows—when dignity and unity were made slightly more possible. There were moments when oil leverage could have been consolidated, when militaries could have united, when normalization treatises could have been annulled, when trade deals canceled.
But they chose neither of these redemptive windows. Now, Pax Judaica is already here. The window of dignity has firmly closed, not because Zionism was invincible, but because fear prevailed and became the status quo. It is because Muslims borrowed their narratives by colonial osmosis: “political Islam” = bad. “Shi’i Mullas” = existential threat.
It is because Arab leaders feared for their own self preservation more than the threat of external colonization. Because they feared their own populations more than expansionist ambitions that have come to ravage them all. They feared falling out of favor with the pedophilic elite more than the loss of the sacred sites in Mecca, Madina and Al-Quds.
Yet they always had a choice.
They were repeatedly given redemptive windows, but they chose to selfishly protect regime survival over true sovereignty. They chose subservience to Tel Aviv instead of the honor of being able to defend Islamic civilizational integrity. By doing so, they totally abdicated their moral legitimacy and the fickle myth of “sovereignty.”
After Gaza, it is all being laid bare for all to see: the Arab Emperors have no clothes.
The ultimate, painfully poetic irony and wretched ending is that that sons and daughters of military servicemen and women in Jordan, UAE, Bahrain and Qatar will die not for Palestine, but likely to advance the very pronounced and evident schemes of Greater Israel.
How will this end, you ask?
From the banks of the Jordan to the Nile, from the Euphrates to the Gulf, there is no longer any modicum of ambiguity that these security states are now doing the military, expansionist bidding of Greater Israel. Thankfully, the doublespeak is over and their populations cannot feign hiding behind the sedating excuses of ignorance or giving excuses. Now, everyone is culpable as the vision is crystal clear.
The end of the Sykes-Picot, ruse-based order is now firmly here: but there is a choice on what comes next. A restoration of true sovereignty, of Pax Islamica, or the triumph of Pax Judaica?
It behooves us to understand that we never left the colonial matrix. Thankfully, this is now more self-evident. We were forced to accept submission as “pragmatism,” betrayal as “diplomacy,” colonization as “peace-building” and resistance as “extremism”. Not any more. The era of pretending, of reptilian ambiguity is over. Now, we can see the full, reeking nakedness of this deceitful cadaver and it can no longer hide behind liberal, Orwellian buzzwords.
And we know why. Because it rests on a lie: postcolonial sovereignty never was. It is yet to be achieved.
The Gaza holocaust tried to warn everyone, but they ignored her children’s screams.
Palestinians told you repeatedly, that normalization would not bring anyone safety. That it harms all.
That housing foreign military bases and security coordination would not guarantee anyone stability.
That the abandonment of Palestine would not grant Arab states safety, immortality, nor would it protect its borders.
After all, the plague does not remain confined to one house. The fire does not stop at one fickle wall.
You see, Palestine has made it crystal clear that the Arab abandonment of Palestine was not merely a pragmatic, self-preservationist, tactical foreign policy decision on their part.
Rather, it signals total moral paralysis and a terminal spiritual fracture. It is self-amputation. And amputations, if untreated, poison the body.
Greater Israel is charge now, but this rise did not appear in a vacuum. It is criminal, yes, but it is also cumulative and collaborative. It is what Arab and Muslim colluding hands have sown over decades of compromise, fear, and repression.
Thankfully, a brief window is now revealing itself briefly once more.
The ummah, like each of us individually, stand before a final choice:
Painful truth, or sweet lies?
Sectarian score-keeping or true, ummah-oriented unity?
The pacifier of “stability and safety” or a prophetic Islam of lived sacrifice?
Auto-critique, or perpetual infantilization and victimhood?
Real sovereignty, or permanent subcontracting and vassalage?
Truth hurts. Truth incinerates. It exposes collaboration. It dismantle myths of eternal “safety and stability.” It demands existential loyalty shifts from tribalism and selfishness to uniting and affirming true Oneness.
No matter how painful it is, only truth can set a civilization free.
Muslim sovereignty has been a myth.
That illusion must die before anything living can be born.
!Allah has not made for a man two hearts in his interior.
And He has not made your wives whom you declare unlawful your mothers.
And he has not made your adopted sons your [true] sons.
That is [merely] your saying by your mouths,
but Allah says the truth, and He guides to the [right] way.”
– Qur’an Surat Al-‘Aĥzāb (The Combined Forces) – سورة الأحزاب
_______
https://twitter.com/pati_marins64/status/2035080265832493519
#autonomy #colonialism #Gaza #Iran #Israel #liberation #mentalSlavery #Palestine #politics #SOVEREIGNTY #Zionism -
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker
Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.
By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026
Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / GettyOn September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.
“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”
The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”
I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”
The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)
In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”
It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.
During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.
Video From The New Yorker Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session
Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.
I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.
But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.
Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.
Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)
At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.
The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.
Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.
“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”
Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)
Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.
These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.
The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”
Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”
As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”
Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”
At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”
Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.
There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”
My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.
In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.
“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦
Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker
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How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker
Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.
By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026
Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / GettyOn September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.
“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”
The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”
I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”
The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)
In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”
It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.
During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.
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Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.
I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.
But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.
Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.
Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)
At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.
The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.
Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.
“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”
Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)
Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.
These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.
The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”
Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”
As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”
Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”
At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”
Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.
There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”
My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.
In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.
“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦
Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker
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How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker
Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.
By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026
Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / GettyOn September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.
“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”
The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”
I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”
The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)
In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”
It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.
During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.
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Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.
I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.
But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.
Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.
Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)
At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.
The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.
Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.
“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”
Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)
Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.
These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.
The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”
Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”
As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”
Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”
At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”
Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.
There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”
My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.
In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.
“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦
Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker
#300Fired #CitizenKane #DemocracyUnderThreat #Destroying #Financial #Firings #HistoryOfBezos #JeffBezos #Killing #Lies #Murder #NationalNewspaper #NewspaperReporters #OneThirdOfNewsroom #TheNewYorker #TheWashingtonPost -
Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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“I Don’t Make a Fetish Out of Nonviolence.” Interview With Ray Luc Levasseur on the United Freedom Front
On 16 April 2025, Unity of Fields interviewed Ray Luc Levasseur, a former political prisoner. In 1975 Levasseur co-founded the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, which later renamed itself the United Freedom Front. They carried out dozens of expropriations and anti-imperialist bombings until their capture in 1984, after being on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Levasseur was sentenced to 45 years and served his time in some of the most brutal and repressive prisons in the country, USP Marion and ADX Florence, including thirteen years in solitary confinement. He was released in 2004 after serving 20 years, and now lives in his home state of Maine. The interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
If you are interested in reading more about Ray Luc Levasseur and the United Freedom Front, we recommend reading Until All Are Free: The Trial Statement of Ray Luc Levasseur and checking out his online archives at UMass Amherst, where you can find many of the documents mentioned in the interview.
Download a zine version to print/fold here.
Editorial disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views of Unity of Fields.
Unity of Fields: When people nowadays think of anti-imperialist armed struggle in the US, they tend to think of the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party (BPP), maybe the Black Liberation Army (BLA), maybe the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Often people aren’t aware of numerous smaller clandestine formations that were active around the same time, like the one you were part of, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit (SM-JJ), which later renamed itself the United Freedom Front (UFF).
UFF is such an interesting, and, in a lot of ways, quite successful, case study of militancy. You came into revolutionary struggle in a slightly later generation than Weather, and in a different way than the stereotype of white radical elite college student — you were radicalized by serving in Vietnam, serving time in prison for a minor drug offense, and coming from a very working-class background.
Could you speak to how you see UFF’s trajectory in this context, and why you think it is generally less well known? And why is it important for people of younger generations, especially those interested in the question of militancy, to consider?
Ray Luc Levasseur: Part of it is some of these groups were very short-lived, for one thing. They traveled fast, but they went down in flames pretty fast too. It’s been a problem in terms of clandestine groups in this country. I mean, there’s amazing number that just didn’t last very long and took major hits and were pretty much decommissioned. The SLA weren’t around all that long either but one of the big reasons people remember them is because of the significant media coverage of it. But a lot of the other groups didn’t get that kind of media coverage like Weather or the SLA did. I don’t know if that’s class-based or not.
Those of us that I was underground with, we all had some kind of previous political activity in public, but we were not part of big chapters of a national group per se. A couple of us were, I was in national VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), one of us had been in SDS, but in chapters that were not at the forefront of media attention. I think the George Jackson Brigade was like this too. So people in that particular area where they were operating, you know, would have a better idea of what’s going on, who this was being conducted by, and connect the message to the people where others don’t. A lot of the publicity, a lot of the media coverage is really negative, and part of the purpose for that, was not just in terms of what the general public was reading, but in terms of what political activists were reading.
Clandestinity by its nature, people don’t know who you are and they can be very distrustful. And depending also on the extent of your aboveground support network, not every group has one, but every group should have one. A group like Weather had a really extensive aboveground network and that could be utilized in a lot of ways to promote the cause and build a little support, and certainly awareness and keeping the group front and center in people’s minds politically and personally. We had an aboveground network going under that was eventually decommissioned through police and other methods and then we went through a dry spell and then we started to rebuild another one. That support network eventually collapsed similar to the BLA network that collapsed after the Brinks [Robbery in 1981], and their network was more extensive than ours. That’s a major blow to any group. I know that it played a really significant factor with us, particularly the second time around where it had collapsed. That really contributes to your isolation. That kind of isolation is the enemy of an underground group because it hampers your ability to recruit and do all kinds of things. Essentially it cuts off the logistical network. The kind of support, material and otherwise, political and otherwise, that you might be getting through that aboveground support network all of a sudden just gets shut off. You cut off a supply route and it really has a big impact on even a conventional military force. Look what’s happened in Lebanon when the israelis were really able to dismantle a lot of the network that was supporting both Hezbollah and to some degree Hamas, it’s had a big impact. And the more isolated you get, the less you’re out there. Your voice is diminished somewhat.
I think that when you say the Panthers, you’re really talking about BLA, in terms of more clandestine actions. The Panthers always, or did for a long time, had clandestine networks, but they weren’t there in an offensive capacity, they were more self-defense oriented. They’d have a safe house, they’d have the proper credentials, paper identification, funds, a way for somebody to disappear quickly if the need was there. The BLA actually had things set up more like we had set up, where you’re dealing strictly with people that are underground, have to stay underground, and are carrying the initiative forward. They’re initiating actions. They’re not there in the self-defense mode per se, I dunno if that makes sense. But the two [the BLA and BPP] often get used interchangeably, and the BLA benefited from the huge, huge reputation and media attention that the Panthers had, benefited in the sense of what the question you asked is, why some of these groups are well-known and some are not. So Weather had built its reputation by its involvement with SDS. Then when a significant number of them go underground and become the Weather Underground Organization, they’re already pretty well known. So that’s my thinking behind those two particular organizations. And both were around for a long time, especially when you consider those particular roots, one in the [Black] Panther Party and one in groups like SDS.
UoF: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but based on what I’ve read about the United Freedom Front, it sounds like you guys achieved a huge number of successful actions and evaded capture for longer than many other groups. Is that correct? Why that was the case?
RLL: It is correct. In fact, I think that’s one of our main claims to fame, really, is the length of time we were underground. Because we weren’t just hiding. We were the number one fugitives they wanted in the country. After the first couple years we became number one. As the other groups got picked off or decommissioned in one way or another, those forces of repression can focus more and more on you. Plus we were very active, we were always doing something and they knew it. High-risk stuff. We had developed means that if we had just wanted to be underground just to live away from the eyes and ears of the government, we could have done that indefinitely, because we had the methods down so well. But our justification for being underground was to be active. I wouldn’t be underground if I couldn’t stay active. So we were constantly carrying out actions of one kind or another throughout the whole time, including many close calls. And when you look at groups, even within the BLA itself, which was more extensive than we were, and they were around for a considerable period of time, but individual cells within the BLA, a lot of ’em went down really quick. But they were large enough where they could absorb the loss and keep going.
We were smaller, we couldn’t handle too many hits. You know what I mean? When you go up against the repressive arm of this government, they have all the money, the resources, the manpower, the computer power. They can make mistake after mistake after mistake. I can sit in and talk to you about the strategic and tactical mistakes the FBI and other police made in trying to get us. But because of that foundation, the endless supply of funding and police power, weaponry and intelligence, all of it, they can make mistake after mistake, and just go back to the drawing board and do it again. When you’re a small organization, there’s very little margin of error for you. You can make one mistake and it all comes tumbling down.
Now, to give you an idea in terms of even Weather and BLA, which had had pretty good resources, the Brinks case really was like, if you look at it, it’s like all of a sudden the dominoes started falling. A huge part of their total underground infrastructure just went down around that one action. So you don’t have the room to make those kinds of mistakes. I think it’s really to our credit that we were underground for ten years. I mean, what other group can you see that did that and was politically active for that entire period of time and with a number one target on our backs almost the whole time?
Expropriation was a part of our strategy, and that’s different than certain clandestine formations that got their funding a different way. When you look at Weather, some of that money obviously came from some pretty wealthy family members and friends, that was part of the network, right? There’s a difference in building revolutionary power, trying to build a clandestine armed movement. You’re building a different kind of revolutionary when you fund yourself through armed actions that target financial institutions to uphold capitalism as opposed to having Uncle John send you $10,000 stipend every month. And you can extrapolate from that into the nonprofit industrial complex. I know some really good people and good organizations that are nonprofits and they skimp to get by to do some really good community work. But there are a lot of nonprofits where the money just rolls in regularly every month, some grant, some foundation, to pay your pretty decent salary and all the benefits that are accrued with it…it makes for a different organization. It makes for a different mindset. Anyways, where were we?
UoF: Not to oversimplify, but I think you could say that guerrillas inside of the imperial core take two distinct paths — one, those who think revolution is impossible within the core, and their primary goal is to give as much material support to Third World revolutionaries, without the expectation that the masses here will join them. And two, those who may share the primary goal of materially supporting Third World revolutionaries, but also think revolution is possible within the core and aim to win popular support and grow their ranks. Of course there has been a lot of internal disagreement on these questions within some of the formations we’re talking about. And in the so-called United States it’s more complex than, say, Denmark, because it’s built on settler colonialism. The “working class” here is still largely pacified by imperial super profits but there are also internal colonies with far more revolutionary potential because they are fighting national liberation struggles. How did you all conceptualize revolution here, and how did the UFF relate to the Third World national liberation struggles, including those internal to the US?
RLL: Well, when I was part of it, we were trying to build a revolutionary resistance movement. We were anti-imperialists. So much is based on time, place, and conditions. If you don’t factor in time, place, and conditions into things, you can get off the mark really well, including with armed actions and stuff. You’ve got to factor these three components in to make decisions about how you’re going to move. At that time we’re talking, if you go back to SM-JJ [Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit], you’re talking early, mid-seventies, and then all the way up to UFF [United Freedom Front].
The last UFF action was 1984. It’s an interesting communiqué that UFF put out. They hit Union Carbide, which was a big mining company in South Africa, Amerikan-owned multinational, and the communiqué answer the call to all parts of the anti-apartheid movement that existed at that time and any progressive revolutionary people that. It was really coming together pretty well, this aboveground anti-apartheid movement in the US at the time. But this communiqué was encouraging that [aboveground] movement to continue, while recognizing that we’re trying to build a multifaceted anti-imperialist movement, which for us necessitated a clandestine sector that was armed, armed for self-defense, and armed for offensive actions and that they were not mutually exclusive, that they should compliment each other. Multilevel, we’re at different levels, but we’re part of the same movement. So we encouraged the BDS movement at the time, students, workers, etc, to keep at it the same way because we were going to keep it at it as well.
In terms of that anti-imperialist view from going back to the seventies into the eighties, we clearly really took our view of things based a lot on the national liberation struggles of the time. When you go back then, they were all over the world, anti-colonial struggles included in that. Just look at Africa: Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola. To us, these Third World national liberation struggles were a cutting edge of resisting and fighting back against US imperialism as it spread throughout the world. Each one of those countries that liberated itself was going to weaken US imperialism to some degree. And our role in part was to be supportive of those struggles. International solidarity, if you need a term for it. That was how we considered ourselves; they’re the vanguard, we’re the rear guard. The rear guard because we’re in the Belly of the Beast, we’re the US, we have some responsibility politically, morally, personally to do something, to attack the same system that’s being attacked by these revolutionary movements. It’s a unique position to be within the US and try to fight on the same field of battle, so to speak, in support of these liberation struggles.
The great thinkers and guerrilla fighters that came out of these struggles [in the Third World] had a lot of influence on our own political vision and analysis. I was looking at the reading list on the Unity of Fields website. I can tell you, I’ve read many of those books. Everything from Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. These were tremendously influential on us because Urban Guerrilla Warfare was relatively new at that time. It was like opening up a new area. George Jackson says, I think in Blood in my Eye, that the urban landscape can conceal a guerrilla as well as the jungle canopy. And we took that to heart.
What came after liberation in each of those countries, you know, we paid a lot of attention to the groups made up the different movements in the different colonies and different countries, because sometimes there would be multiple organizations. Obviously we would favor the political view of one group usually, but it wasn’t our job to put that out there. That was just to enable us to see what direction things were going in, and which organizations in these movements had the best prospects of really freeing the people there. So what came after liberation, we didn’t delve into, other than you’re freeing up a colony, you’re freeing up a people, which means self-determination for the first time for these people so that they are in a position, once they liberate themselves from foreign conflict, colonization or intervention, then they are much better suited to determine by themselves the direction they want to take to put that liberation into real terms for their people. Our actions were meant to keep those liberation struggles on the agenda in this country, both with the left and as much of the general public as we could reach through what we were doing.
I think you mentioned the internal colonies as well, and that somewhat unique situation. Not all the underground groups from that period looked at internal colonies the same way. Even within certain organizations, it generally might not be completely unified on a position on the internal colonies. Our position was that Black people in this country do compromise an internal colony. So we’re looking at Black people, what do they want? What are the Black radical groups saying? What are they doing? Recognizing that somebody’s internally colonized is different than offering a format to deal with that. So it wasn’t our position to offer that format, our position was to support a freedom struggle. If you look at the position papers and communiqués and underground papers from that era, you’ll see that there is support for the national liberation of all of those internal colonies.
We did get very involved with the Puerto Rican struggle, which is a little bit different in the sense that you have the diaspora here, you have a huge number of Puerto Ricans in this country, but the island is the land base of the nation. How they were going to deal with the diaspora, that comes with liberating your national borders. That’s the way I see it, anyways. We were really supportive of Puerto Rican independence and the release of the Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners that were kept at that time, Lolita LeBron and the others, and in fact, we were charged with quite a few actions around Puerto Rican independence. That we felt was very material support given as many Puerto Ricans in this country. My number one goal has been dismantle this fucking imperialist system. I think the internal colonies are a potential Achilles heel of imperialism right within its own borders.
UoF: Absolutely agree. I was going to ask you a question about the state of the Palestine solidarity movement in this country, and I think that’s actually very related to our discussion about the internal colonies. Because the most useful thing we could do here for Palestine, for any Third World national liberation struggle, is to make a revolution here — to dismantle US imperialism from within. And obviously the internal colonies, now and historically, have the most revolutionary potential, so that goes hand in hand.
I think the “Palestine solidarity movement,” as they call it, is coming up against the limitations of its own form. I’m not trying to say this in a defeatist way because I also think the movement has made great advances, but those advances have led us to this impasse or breaking point. The movement has failed in part by not addressing this issue of internal colonialism, by not universalizing the Palestinian struggle into a broader anti-imperialist struggle. That failure has manifested itself most clearly in the movement’s weak positions on the police, on resistance to the police, and on whether militancy should take place here at all. There’s a lot of rhetorical support for resistance far away, but not when it takes place here, which is why the movement also ignores a lot of the political prisoners in Amerikan dungeons, like Casey Goonan. And to be clear, when I say “movement,” I’m mostly talking about the nonprofit industrial complex, which is why I don’t even like using the term “movement” really, and I appreciated your critique of nonprofits earlier and how reformist they tend to become. But back to my point — we’ll be chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied” at police-permitted and peace-police-marshalled parades without acknowledging that the Amerikan police are the domestic occupying force of the internal colonies here. That idea leads us to the logical conclusiont hat we should be resisting the police, and I don’t think these nonprofits actually really want people to do that, because like you said, they care about their grant money and their bottomline.
When we were chatting the other week, you were also comparing how you and your comrades would be policed for supporting the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) and waving their flags at protests to how we are now told not to wave our Hezbollah flags or wear Hamas or PFLP headbands. So this kind of conditional “solidarity” that is actually anti-resistance is definitely not a new phenomenon, although the existence of the terror lists and designations has made people all the more scared of resistance, or given them more excuses to shy away from openly supporting it.
But yeah, I guess I’m wondering what you think of the Palestine solidarity movement now, especially in this current wave of repression. Do you think the movement can transcend the limits of its current framework, its single issueism, really break out into a broader anti-imperialist movement?
RLL: Important question. Well, the Palestine solidarity movement, I mean, I’m not the best judge of this in my current situation. You could be a better judge of it than me. I don’t know.
I used to get into it with activists from New York a lot because I detected this attitude among some that New York was the center of the universe, and what people do outside of the center of that universe somehow doesn’t quite measure up to what’s up in New York. And it’s not just with somebody like me who lives in rural Maine, but I got friends and comrades in Boston and they get to sometimes the same way that they feel like, especially when they’re working with people and they want to put an event together. “Oh, is this is going to be New York or Boston,” and Boston seems to play in second field all the time and it sort irritates them. Or you get over into the Bay Area, it is very different being a radical in a place like rural Maine. I think I could mesh in much easier in the city like New York or the Bay Area that has a lot of old radicals, but in a place like Maine, it’s like you’re the only game in town. That’s why its fricking media and the cops still know who I am despite the time that’s gone by.
But anyways, first of all, I’m going to say this question has come up even here in Maine, and we have some very committed activists here to figuring out which way forward, examining and reexamining actions that people are involved with. Everything from cultural events to CD [civil disobedience] where people get arrested and all these marches and all these rallies. I saw the piece on PSL in Unity of Fields and apparently there’s some differences there over strategy. I mean, PSL is here. I know some of them, I knew ’em before they were PSL. PSL hasn’t been around in any significant numbers until relatively recently. I mean it predates October 2023, but they hadn’t been around and they’re recruiting. When it comes to which way forward with Palestine solidarity, it’s still a work in progress as various groups hold a range of strategies and tactics. It’s an issue here in Maine and people talk about it because they want to build on what’s happened so far.
The positive thing that I see is that I have never seen so much support, I’ll use it generically, the word “support,” and awareness around the Palestinian liberation struggle as I see now. That’s happened since October of 2023. I’ve seen it manifested in many different ways and I’ve also seen it in other parts of the country. I’m in touch with activists in other parts of the country. I’m seeing the same thing there. I could take it a step further and see it also in significant parts of the world.
Because historically among the left, and I’m not talking about different party lines between different sectarian groups who want to argue to death over some line, I’m talking about substantive issues — you couldn’t find a lefty group in this country that wasn’t opposed to apartheid South Africa. But as the years passed by, Palestine was always, and forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but to put it in New York terms, Palestine was always considered the third rail of left politics.
You know, the third rail in the subway, you touch a third rail and you’re instantly fried, you die. Periodically somebody does that in the subway system and that’s what happens to them. I personally know somebody who happened to die that way. In the NYPD investigation of how he died, they said he tripped and fell on it. This was a young anarchist kid that I knew. This is quite a few years ago. While his comrade was saying no, he got jumped and pushed on it. But in any event, you touch it, you die.
So if you were a supporter of Palestine, you risked being ostracized by people, either individually within a group or by another group. It was always like you could give Palestine a certain amount of rhetorical support in your publication or whatever, but don’t get too heavy-handed with it. Don’t push the resistance too much and don’t push the one [Palestinian] state too much and those kind of things. If you did, then you risk being ostracized politically by other leftists.
I’ve seen that starting to go by the wayside for the first time in my life. I’ve never seen this level of support before. I understand we’d have to go qualify it by going through what do I mean by support? You know what I mean? This and this. But I mean you take ten different ways that people can be supportive from financial to cultural to CD [civil disobedience] to every kind of thing in between, then I think there’s a big positive. It’s a positive, it can be built on, people are trying to build on it, it could grow even more.
I mean, we don’t know what’s going on in Palestine until next week gets here. So much is up in the air right now. None of it seems good, but I think that’s been a pretty amazing thing. You could say, yeah, well, a lot of these people are basic liberals and maybe their idea of Palestine solidarity is to keep writing to their Congress person to vote to stop arms to israel or write a letter to the editor or whatever. I don’t discourage any of that kind of stuff. I just push people to do more. Or I don’t push, I used to push. I try to persuade people to do more. So I think that’s really good.
I think part of the reason you’re seeing the repression amped up, it’s not just because Trump is here, it’s because they’re worried about that level of support [for Palestine] and that’s why they’re coming after people to the extent that they are. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way, I think it’s going to get worse, but I still think that they are predominantly focused on low-hanging fruit. I hate to use that term, but I’ll use it. I’m accustomed to this because I was a prisoner for a long time and I see them do a lot of things to prisoners that people out here just don’t care about, don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and it’s out of sight, out of mind, it’s prisoners, the lower end of everybody. And then five years later they’re doing the same thing to people outside of prison. I can talk about surveillance technologies and all kinds of stuff. They’ll experiment with the prisons first. That’s the low-hanging fruit because we’re the most vulnerable, we’re the most marginalized.
What they’re doing now, especially with the deportation stuff, is they’re targeting people. Totally make up a fucking story. But they’re going after people they know are vulnerable because they’re not a US citizen yet, or they can manipulate a law even if they got a green card or whatever to deport them. Something like this happened with the Red Scare with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and various anarchists and communists that were put on boats, just rounded up and put on boats, and sent to other countries. I think that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing this repression, and it’s a great cause for concern because of the level of fear it induces and also because we have to come to the defense of these people that are being subjected to this repression.
It’s a moral and political obligation that we do that. But it also requires resources. It also requires our attention, our time, our money, whatever support we can muster to defend people that are going to being targeted by this repression. That’s not to say that we should do any less, we should do more to defend people that are under attack. If you follow Cop City at all, you know what I’m talking about. All these people that are being deported could eventually prevail in their case, but the government still has succeeded in disrupting movement activities, scaring people that may be involved away. To them, they look at it like a win-win situation. If they can deport somebody and keep them out, that’s a win. But even if that person comes back, they figure they’d want something because he may be back, but they scared 20 people away, or they tied up people in organizations, tied those resources up, so they can’t be used for anything else.
So I think that the potential is still there right now, despite the repression. I talked about time, place, and conditions — we didn’t have this internet before, we have to get on the fucking internet on a daily basis to find out how those conditions are changing. If you don’t have a good grasp of conditions, then it’s difficult to put together tactical and strategic plans of any kind. And it changes so much. But I think the potential is still there. This movement can grow now.
Single-issue? Yeah, I mean I have to think of the Vietnam War because there were so many people. I was a state coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and my Vietnam veteran partner in that had been a highly decorated army helicopter pilot. I was already an anti-imperialist by the time I got involved with VVAW. And this brother, he was strictly a single-issue person. He wanted to bring this war to an end and it had a moral base to it to a certain degree. He had studied to be a Jesuit before he got hooked into the military and he had strong moral objections to the US being in Vietnam and what they were doing there. I mean combined together, we made some really formidable presentations and worked all well together. But the minute that all was done, that was it. That was the end of his political activism. I immediately jumped. I didn’t wait until the war to be completely over, but it was obviously going to be. I already had made my way into working around the criminal legal system, prisoners and all of that. This was in the seventies when the prisoners rights thing was really big. That turned out to be a good move politically because I never looked at the war as a single issue. To me it was always connected. I just looked at my fucking training, and when I was in Vietnam, to know that white supremacy ran through the whole fricking war. It was white supremacy, racism on a massive scale. It was embedded into us in our training before we even got there. But yeah, I think that that is a problem probably, well, it depends how you look at it, whether it’s a problem or not. It’s a problem in terms of building an anti-imperialist movement. It’s probably a problem for these sectarian groups, including groups like PSL that obviously are involved in more than one issue. When you bring somebody into your organization or group or whatever, this is where political education comes in, really. You got to have political education I feel.
A lot of people could be resistant to that, but I think that’s a good method in which to solidify people’s views about the system and making the connections. Most of the public speaking I do, I just did a class yesterday, it’s focused on prisons and I work in other stuff. I can’t when it’s an academic presentation, which it was, I got an hour and a quarter, and so I can’t go too far afield or I’m not meeting the qualifications of that particular class. I have to keep the focus on this issue, connecting it to larger issues in the criminal legal system, but also connecting it to the issue that are political prisoners in the US, because I always give a very quick thumbnail sketch of my background, my backstory as I call it. I open up, I didn’t just get here yesterday, you know what I mean? I was just a kid from a mill town and this war is originally what turned me on, then being in prison a year after I got out of the army, those dots were connected for me. So they see that right away that I have a more expansive view than just prison. But yeah, I don’t know how big an issue it needs to be right now. How many of these people are going to bail out on Palestine when we get to wherever we’re getting to?
I mean, I’m dealing with some people like that here. The best thing I’ve seen happen is that so many generic anti-war people are doing vigils and stuff. I first ran into them when I got out in 2004 because we were doing them around Iraq, then it was Afghanistan, and they’re against the armaments industry, but they can be pretty generic about it, with their signs and their talk. But I’ve seen some of them cross over into the Palestine issue, which is a big step for some of them. They tend to be politically, how should I put this? Politically, they emphasize nonviolence rather than liberation. I’m going to put it that way. If you’re an anti-imperialist, you emphasize liberation. And resistance to imperialism can be violent or it can be nonviolent. It can be both. But I don’t make a fetish out of nonviolence either philosophically or as a practical manner. Some of these people are crossing over, which is encouraging.
I’m not sure if I’m getting to the issue. We started talking about the demonstration [I went to in Maine recently]. People were showing up from different organizations with all kinds of different issues. I didn’t have any problem with people talking about losing their jobs and social security and healthcare, not war. I understand those issues, but I think the challenge in terms of recruiting people or encouraging people to get involved in Palestine solidarity is you have to be able to show them how it’s related, why Palestine is related to George Floyd, you know what I mean?
UoF: A connection Yahya Sinwar made himself, in one of his last interviews with Western press before the Al-Aqsa Flood. He said in 2021, “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used (by the zionist entity) against the Palestinians.”
RLL: Yeah, you have to do that. I’ve been doing it in one form or another, going back to when I first became politically active. I became active on three fronts — the Vietnam War, the labor struggle, and civil rights. And so that shows right away that as soon as I got politically active in 1968, after I got out of the army, I was connecting the issues right away. So was the organization I was part of, Southern Student Organizing Committee, which sometimes is called a Southern SDS, but I don’t think that’s a really good description. And so our pamphlets and everything reflected that. We had pamphlets by Che Guevara, the Tricontinental Speech, Malcolm X, the history of IWW, whatever that general political education that these issues are related. And I think that long-term, wherever this direction goes with Palestine, is going to be a necessity for solidarity work with Palestine, for a Palestine. It’s going to continue for a long time. You learn from experience and I’ve been around quite a few people who are pretty capable and you can chew gum and walk at the same time other you can do be involved with some other kind of issue as well. We shouldn’t be in a competition to, well, if you’re with this group, you can’t do this over here. If you’re with us, you can’t do that over there. I don’t want to get into too much of that.
UoF: Yeah, totally. We do need unity. And when we say that we mean unity in resistance, not just unity for unity’s sake, which I feel like is what you’re getting to. Everything you’ve said is really reaffirming why we thought it was so important to do this interview because with all this new repression coming down, we certainly are in a new stage, but we’re seeing some people talk about it as if it’s unprecedented when it’s very, very precedented. Maybe people are saying this because because we don’t know our own history, so these historical examples of repression and counter-repression are crucial to study. Our lives depend on it. And we’re really grateful you’re sharing all your experiences. Getting back to the UFF, we were talking about how yall managed to evade capture and stay underground for so long. As our movement is experiencing more surveillance and infiltration, I think this could be really useful advice to people engaged in all sorts of different tactics, so I was wondering if you could speak to how yall vetted people and dealt with infiltration or traitorship.
RLL: That’s been the bane of a number of organizations. The worst snitches are not the ones that you manage to identify or that prove themselves unworthy after they’ve become involved in some kind of one form or another with clandestine work. [The worst snitches are] the people who break after the shit goes down. In other words, a person could be underground for three years, have participated in all kinds of stuff, been dependable, get busted, and they’ll sit him in a fucking room, slap him a couple of times, and they start talking and they’re going to slap him again to shut him up. In other words, they’re passed certain tests and are vetted, so to speak, through actually doing things, but when the heat dial hits a certain level, especially if you are arrested or captured and all of a sudden you are looking at enormous amount of time—just to give you one example, in a very bad prison, that kind of thing—and somebody completely falls apart.That’s a critical question because you’re talking about trust. The deeper in you are, and I don’t mean just underground, there’s a lot of people that get indicted or dragged before grand juries that are aboveground people, some who violate the law and some who don’t. They love fucking conspiracy laws in this country because they’re easy to convict people on. So why do people use Signal? Presumably to give them some kind of protection against conspiracy charges, right? I mean, I won’t get into that. I’ve been charged with conspiracy, different kinds of conspiracies and I know how the law works and that’s a favorite tactic.
In terms of clandestinity, you’re talking about much higher risk and much more serious consequences generally speaking in that kind of situation. So a vetting process procedure is more serious. The gate somebody has to go through to assume a role underground should be fairly vigorous. And this is an issue I touch on in my book because it is so important and there’s no one size that fits all. There’s no particular test that will guarantee you that you are protected against somebody. I mean, there’s various kinds of informants and agents, provocateur or whatnot. If you go back and you look at these groups, a lot of them did have snitches rise out of ’em. In a way, the ones I feel that hurt the most, I mean if somebody comes in, they’re an undercover agent and you get set up and you get busted, that sucks, that hurts, but that’s not going to hurt the way your closest friend in your whole life flips and testifies against you. That really hurts. Or to set you up in a way where one of your comrades get killed or injured or busted, ends up in a fourty-year sentence, whatever. And that kind of betrayal is very difficult to flesh it out because it really comes down to an issue primarily of character. You have to assess a person’s character and you don’t know what somebody’s going to be like for sure until they’ve passed a trial under fire. I’ve known soldiers, conventional soldiers in the United States Army that got grade A’s all through basic and advanced training to be a soldier, fundamental part of learning how to kill somebody. But then when they come under actual enemy fire, they fall completely to pieces, where another trainee soldier who just kind of grunted and just kept their head down and nobody noticed him and he just got through basic training, advanced training and nothing special, nothing else stands out about him, but under fire after training in the real war, they rise above the others. They are able to do everything that a good soldier is supposed to do in a war situation under fire.
So it’s really hard. That comes down to a character issue. And a lot of those other groups got burned. They got burned both ways. They got burned because they recruited the wrong people who turned out pretty quickly to be weak, undependable. They were alright until some cop starts twisting their arm and puts them on a hot seat and they break down and give up information, give up people. Part of it is like being spoken for, recruiting people that others can vouch for. That’s an important thing. Assuming the people that are vouching for them have proven their own selves in one way or another and a trusted comrade, that’s the best referral you can get unless you are coming into the group somebody grew up with or something they’ve known forever or whatever. Because trust is the basic thing. Nobody in our cases ever flipped and they had a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure, because we had kids involved too. And then you got both parents looking at a huge amount of pressures and years to flip and turn government witness. We didn’t have any. Our policy was “Give us 24 hours.” Meaning that we understand that every human is likely to have a breaking point when it comes to brutality and torture. So, a captive holding out for at least 24 hours or longer gives others a chance to dump anything that could be compromised and move on to safety. I think it important to include this because it’s part of the security code but also shows we are not insensitive to those who suffer severe consequences because of their commitment.
We had a snitch. We had people, aboveground support people, who basically testified for grand juries. That’s a whole other issue, but it’s related to this. We used to see a lot of use by the government of grand juries to particularly go after aboveground people seeking information on both the aboveground support networks for the clandestine and for anything they knew about people underground themselves.
But we had one person who flipped early on, and I write about this in my book because this person came to us recommended, but he should have never been recruited. At some point I was starting to notice this person’s character was weak. A number of things happened that told me this person is weak. He was too mouthy, too pushy about we got to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this. You know what I mean? When we didn’t have the capacity to do it, he’s trying to push us into doing actions that at the time would’ve been over our head. So I talked to another comrade about it. He was feeling the same way, this is when it can get dangerous. You’re talking about an armed clandestine movement here, armed organizations, different ways to deal with different disciplinary issues underground. And you got to be very careful and conscientious about how you do it.
There was another unit operating in the same general area as we were. We had a liaison between them and I was really getting uncomfortable with this guy. The other unit expressed interest in him. The guy that I’m talking about, the recruit, the person of bad character, I feel, I told the liaison take him if you want him, but I told the other group, through the liaison, I got questions about this guy’s character. I don’t know, if he’ll hold up, you should know that. The other person in the other group, they wanted him. So we dumped him and the minute he made that change over, we abandoned the safe house. He knew this one safe house where several of us lived and I was so concerned about him that we decided to dump that house, because that was the one place he knew. So if he did collaborate, that’s all he could lead them to and we’d be gone. So he fell in with this other group and I was clear to the other group, we don’t want anything more to do with him. We could have taken more drastic action, but that’s a whole other issue that I don’t want to get into for this. This guy was like all he wanted do was actions, get out there, get out there, boom, hit him again, boom, hit them again. This other group was into that kind of philosophy. I knew there was going to be a problem there. So we cut the liason off and sure enough they got down in the city and they just went to town and they went way beyond that capacity. They were going big there for a few weeks, but it all came crashing down.
This guy I was telling you about was busted with some of the others and part of a aboveground support network. They got into the police barracks, scared him, and the guy never stopped talking. I got his completely grand jury testimony. He buried that whole other group. They all went to prison and broke it up as an organization. At least one person in the aboveground group went to prison. And sure enough, they found that safe house, which we had up on the Canadian border and they went in it. But by the time that happened, we had been gone two or three months by then. He completely turned weak, sold everybody out, and then started lying so that he could incriminate more people and try to incriminate me. He starts lying.
But the underlying factor in all this is desperation. If you can’t recruit when you’re underground or doing any other sensitive stuff — unless your philosophy is we’re going to have a group of two or three people, that’s it, that’s going to be enough to do what we want do the way we want to do it, we don’t need anything more than that — but if you’re trying to build a movement, you need something larger than that. That means you need recruits. And we were desperate for a recruit at the time. He first came in with us, referred to by somebody who’s judgment I trusted, and he was a trustworthy person, he never snitched or anything like that, but his judgment wasn’t the greatest. So when you recruit from a position of desperation, then you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to lower the bar when you evaluate a person. Can this person hold up to this kind of way of living underground, to do the kind of things that is going to be required of that person to do? The minute you start lowering the bar, the risk is greater that you’re going to pull somebody in that’s going to burn you somewhere down the line.
The same thing with an action. Let’s say an expropriation. The worst time to do an expropriation is when you are desperate. You don’t even have next month’s rent. And that’s all tied into your security. If you can’t pay the rent and you get thrown out, you can’t be out on the street. You’re desperate. So you try to avoid that situation. You have enough of a bankroll from expropriations that you are not that desperate to go out and do that again. You’ve got to do it at a time when you have the resources to do it right. It’s the same thing with recruiting people. Don’t let yourself get so politically desperate to have this person or two more people into a group that you’re going to lower the standards, lower the bar in terms of what you’ve determined it takes from your own experience to do the work that would be required of this person.
Fortunately there was nobody else after him with us that did that. When we recruited again later, we had had a lot of experience by then and we needed other people, but we didn’t get to the point where we were desperate. We needed it but we had years of experience — we knew pretty much the requirements of a person to live underground with a lot of heat on you and to do the kinds of things that are necessary. A lot of that stuff is stuff that even aboveground activists don’t know because they haven’t been through the experience — how many ways you can make yourself look and sound different, everything you need to know about fictitious identification and on and on, right down to the littlest details. We had documents, you’ll find some of this in my archives at UMass, they were like little training manuals for new recruits. So the people were given some orientation period to what would be required of them because people don’t have much experience with underground. And the lack of experience has cost people their lives underground.
UoF: That was so useful, I think to a lot of people reading this who are doing all different kinds of work. The points you make about how being aboveground or being a public-facing spokesperson does not mean you are safe is really important. A lot of the people we’re seeing get abducted right now were those public facing people and were in fact sometimes very moderate politically and they’re still being targeted. It’s not just people doing direct action that need to be preparing for grand jury resistance, etc, that sort of repression will target our movement at every level.
I wanted to close out maybe by asking you about why the UFF was originally named the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, if you could speak to the significance of these two freedom fighters. I know you just read the interview we did with Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr.
RLL: Well, Jonathan Jackson was really very influential on me, even before I went underground. Not only with me, but with others, especially those of us who were underground, to the point where Tom Manning and Carol Manning who were part of our group named their son who was born underground after him. His son was born underground. Thinking about kids, it’s a whole other subject, right? One thing I learned underground was, and I learned it from my partner, this is the kind of thing that a normal aboveground person would not think of, that a very pregnant woman can move better underground and faster than a woman with a two or three-weeks-old child. And we actually learned that from experience.
Now, who contemplating going underground is thinking about something like that? I mean, this goes back to what I was saying, before we get off into a hundred things about living that life. But Jonathan was the inspiration, as I told you about, for our coded secret dating system. It was based on a calendar that was, and you can see, George’s words in the back of his last page of his book, in Soledad Brother, that the death of Jonathan was such an important event it need to be noted on our calendars, ad infinitum, in other words, forever. So we developed a calendar based on that, that began with the first day after Jonathan’s death.*
Jonathan, as a 17-year-old manchild coming from a colonized nation, an internal colony, he really represented and signified and epitomized Carlos Marighella’s words, that “The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Without initiative there is no action. Jonathan, he has the kind of heart that it takes to be a revolutionary it takes to sacrifice and live that commitment and to the fullest. He was a 17-year-old version of Carlos Margighella, really, in a way.
I remember an interview with Jonathan Jackson from a very long time ago. I don’t remember the publication, but this was when he was working on the Soledad Brothers’ case, and I remember him being asked why he was so angry, and why he was so militant, something to that effect. And his answer was, “What would you do if it was your brother?” That resonated with me, and I felt that deeply, and I still do. Because to make the kind of sacrifice that he made, to make that commitment and then that sacrifice, to put it all on the line, to rescue those brothers, to free those brothers from the Marin County Courthouse, that’s as much heart as you can bring into anything. And if you had a hundred like him, you could probably take some very significant steps and forward movement to bringing this whole fucking system down.
That’s the kind of heart it takes. That’s a warrior’s heart, and there’s different ways to express it. But the thing that he said, when he said “What if it was your brother,” he’s trying to get people that don’t quite wrap their head around liberating Black captives using firearms. They can’t quite wrap their head around it. So he phrased it that way. To him, it could be his brother George, or it could have been William Christmas or Ruchell Magee because they were there too. But that’s the essential core of a revolutionary, is to identify really strongly, emotionally with oppressed people.
In the cases that I was involved with around, let’s say, the slaughter that was going on in Central America in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at the time — I’m going to telling the jury this. I represent myself. I can give my own statements. I don’t identify with the ruling class in this country, the Ronald Reagans and the elites of either party, the fucking collaborators, whether the head of unions or head of associations or whatever they were the head. Who I identified with were the campesinos that were struggling and fighting for the own liberation in Central America, be they Mayans in Guatemala or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You have to have that feeling, and it’s part of what enabled me to do what I did blissfully and wish I could do more, because that’s what my love was, that’s what my feeling was for these people. And Jonathan was like that. I mean, he was like a hero, that’s an overused word these days, but he really was, a great inspiration to us.
UoF: It reminds me of what George said about martyrdom, that we shouldn’t cry, we should celebrate, we should only be sad that it’s taken so long for people willing to make those sacrifices to arrive. “These comrades must make the first contribution. They will be the first to fall. We gather up their bodies, clean them, kiss them and smile. Their funerals should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. We should be sad only that it’s taken us so many generations to produce them.”
RLL: Yeah. I’ve ran into this because I’ve done so much work around political prisoners, and it’s an abstract thing to a lot of people, and I always use the term our political prisoners, because to really be inspired enough to do any solidarity support work around political prisoners in this country, especially if you haven’t done any, you’ve got to take that first step to understand why you need to support activists when they’re imprisoned, and you look at other countries, just look at Palestine, you get a good example. They embrace their imprisoned people. They don’t marginalize them. So I always tell people, these are our political prisoners. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with every fricking thing that they did tactically or strategically or anything else. I mean, if somebody goes to prison for sabotaging the Dakota Pipeline, I may not have the same politics as them, but I totally understand what’s going on here and whose side I’m on, and then that person needs support. So I say, these are our prisoners. This is how you have to think about it. These are our prisoners.
So when I used to look at what was happening in Central America, I’m not looking at like, oh, these foreigners down here. These are people that our struggle is meant to provide some kind of support for, to expose the truth of what’s happening to them, to expose the government’s criminal enterprise and criminal activity that’s destroying these people, taking their lives from them. You have to have that sort of heart to heart connection. It has to beyond abstract. It doesn’t mean that you have to have a gun in your hand as Jonathan did on that particular day, but it means that to be able to step up, do more work, make more sacrifices of your time, your resources — whatever you need to see people like that.
I was doing stuff that I had never done before. The battlefield had completely changed. To me, once you get ensnared into that criminal legal system and you’re looking at trials and stuff, to me, it’s an extension of the battlefield you just left. And the battlefield I just left, the underground, the odds were always against us. We were always outgunned, outnumbered, outresourced. It was the David versus Goliath kind of situation. I get into captivity and I realize this is an extension of that same battlefield. I’m outgunned, outnumbered, out, resourced. They’re trying to like hell to destroy me and my comrades. And so the tactics have to change, the strategy has to change, but it’s the same struggle, just on a different plane. And then when you get to prison, same thing there, it changes again and the odds to increase against you again, and you have to make it work there.
And in prison, it always goes back to the same thing we thought about earlier, political education. I never knew a political prisoner in prison doing any kind of years that didn’t engage in political education and tried to get little groups going or exchanges, depending on the situation you were in, with people who were there for offenses that were not political, but to try to change their consciousness, especially with the youngsters.
Of course, George is very big on this in his book. I mean, he really goes on about the importance of political education in that situation. Sam Melville was also an influence on me. I did not know Sam Melville personally, but my admiration for him stems as much, if not more, from his role in Attica than his relatively brief underground years. Although I have to admire anybody that bombed United Fruit, which he did, it goes by a different name now. But I mean, when you look at what has been designated as a genocide directed to Mayan people by the US-backed regime in Guatemala in the eighties, I mean, that’s where United Fruit was from. They owned fucking Guatemala. And so I was pleased to see that. If you’re reading Sam’s history, you realize he made some mistakes as he wasn’t real well acquainted with living and operating underground, and he stood up through all of it. I think it comes down, and this applies to Jonathan too, but Sam Melville, despite whatever personal deficiencies he had, he was a person of principle.
I can tell you from my own experience, and when I was going into the last part of the last year that I was underground, the tenth year, the writing sort of was on the wall. Most of the underground groups that were operating on any level at all when we first went underground were decommissioned. People were in prison, some died, some just scattered. The network of groups that existed was down to very little in 1984. In fact, it only continued on into ’85 and not really beyond that.
Part of the hopes of building something, I’m looking at it in 1984, and the people that I thought would still be there were gone, and they hadn’t been replaced. I knew then that our hopes of really setting up a network of clandestine groups, anti-imperialist clandestine groups that could go even much farther than 10 years, was almost a pipe dream at that point. But I kept going because of principle. Apartheid still existed in South Africa, and the slaughters going on in Central America were still happening. I would justify it to myself personally, I felt that as a matter of principle, I was not going to give up the struggle at that point. I was going to keep going, even if it was only based on a matter of principle, even if the material conditions were just absolutely not there anymore, beyond just basic survival to build anything more, I was still going to keep going, at least for the immediate future, which of course ended on November 4th, 1984.
UoF: We ended the interview here. *Ray emailed us this note after:
FYI: On the last letter, last page of Soledad Brother George writes:
August 9, 1970 Real Date, 2 days A.D.
Dear Joan, We reckon all time in the future from the day of the man-child’s death.
We devised a dating system based on this which took an FBI counter-terrorism resource center months to figure out, simple as it is.
In our NY trial the prosecutor presenting their closing statement to the jury brought up that 2 of our comrades/defendants had the audacity to name their son after Jonathan Jackson who kidnapped a judge, etc, etc. His point being that these people are radical extremists who not only engage in political violence, they celebrate it.
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RLL-1-1Download source: Unity of Fieldshttps://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18717
#antiImperialism #northAmerica #resistance #unitedFreedomFront
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“I Don’t Make a Fetish Out of Nonviolence.” Interview With Ray Luc Levasseur on the United Freedom Front
On 16 April 2025, Unity of Fields interviewed Ray Luc Levasseur, a former political prisoner. In 1975 Levasseur co-founded the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, which later renamed itself the United Freedom Front. They carried out dozens of expropriations and anti-imperialist bombings until their capture in 1984, after being on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Levasseur was sentenced to 45 years and served his time in some of the most brutal and repressive prisons in the country, USP Marion and ADX Florence, including thirteen years in solitary confinement. He was released in 2004 after serving 20 years, and now lives in his home state of Maine. The interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
If you are interested in reading more about Ray Luc Levasseur and the United Freedom Front, we recommend reading Until All Are Free: The Trial Statement of Ray Luc Levasseur and checking out his online archives at UMass Amherst, where you can find many of the documents mentioned in the interview.
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Editorial disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views of Unity of Fields.
Unity of Fields: When people nowadays think of anti-imperialist armed struggle in the US, they tend to think of the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party (BPP), maybe the Black Liberation Army (BLA), maybe the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Often people aren’t aware of numerous smaller clandestine formations that were active around the same time, like the one you were part of, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit (SM-JJ), which later renamed itself the United Freedom Front (UFF).
UFF is such an interesting, and, in a lot of ways, quite successful, case study of militancy. You came into revolutionary struggle in a slightly later generation than Weather, and in a different way than the stereotype of white radical elite college student — you were radicalized by serving in Vietnam, serving time in prison for a minor drug offense, and coming from a very working-class background.
Could you speak to how you see UFF’s trajectory in this context, and why you think it is generally less well known? And why is it important for people of younger generations, especially those interested in the question of militancy, to consider?
Ray Luc Levasseur: Part of it is some of these groups were very short-lived, for one thing. They traveled fast, but they went down in flames pretty fast too. It’s been a problem in terms of clandestine groups in this country. I mean, there’s amazing number that just didn’t last very long and took major hits and were pretty much decommissioned. The SLA weren’t around all that long either but one of the big reasons people remember them is because of the significant media coverage of it. But a lot of the other groups didn’t get that kind of media coverage like Weather or the SLA did. I don’t know if that’s class-based or not.
Those of us that I was underground with, we all had some kind of previous political activity in public, but we were not part of big chapters of a national group per se. A couple of us were, I was in national VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), one of us had been in SDS, but in chapters that were not at the forefront of media attention. I think the George Jackson Brigade was like this too. So people in that particular area where they were operating, you know, would have a better idea of what’s going on, who this was being conducted by, and connect the message to the people where others don’t. A lot of the publicity, a lot of the media coverage is really negative, and part of the purpose for that, was not just in terms of what the general public was reading, but in terms of what political activists were reading.
Clandestinity by its nature, people don’t know who you are and they can be very distrustful. And depending also on the extent of your aboveground support network, not every group has one, but every group should have one. A group like Weather had a really extensive aboveground network and that could be utilized in a lot of ways to promote the cause and build a little support, and certainly awareness and keeping the group front and center in people’s minds politically and personally. We had an aboveground network going under that was eventually decommissioned through police and other methods and then we went through a dry spell and then we started to rebuild another one. That support network eventually collapsed similar to the BLA network that collapsed after the Brinks [Robbery in 1981], and their network was more extensive than ours. That’s a major blow to any group. I know that it played a really significant factor with us, particularly the second time around where it had collapsed. That really contributes to your isolation. That kind of isolation is the enemy of an underground group because it hampers your ability to recruit and do all kinds of things. Essentially it cuts off the logistical network. The kind of support, material and otherwise, political and otherwise, that you might be getting through that aboveground support network all of a sudden just gets shut off. You cut off a supply route and it really has a big impact on even a conventional military force. Look what’s happened in Lebanon when the israelis were really able to dismantle a lot of the network that was supporting both Hezbollah and to some degree Hamas, it’s had a big impact. And the more isolated you get, the less you’re out there. Your voice is diminished somewhat.
I think that when you say the Panthers, you’re really talking about BLA, in terms of more clandestine actions. The Panthers always, or did for a long time, had clandestine networks, but they weren’t there in an offensive capacity, they were more self-defense oriented. They’d have a safe house, they’d have the proper credentials, paper identification, funds, a way for somebody to disappear quickly if the need was there. The BLA actually had things set up more like we had set up, where you’re dealing strictly with people that are underground, have to stay underground, and are carrying the initiative forward. They’re initiating actions. They’re not there in the self-defense mode per se, I dunno if that makes sense. But the two [the BLA and BPP] often get used interchangeably, and the BLA benefited from the huge, huge reputation and media attention that the Panthers had, benefited in the sense of what the question you asked is, why some of these groups are well-known and some are not. So Weather had built its reputation by its involvement with SDS. Then when a significant number of them go underground and become the Weather Underground Organization, they’re already pretty well known. So that’s my thinking behind those two particular organizations. And both were around for a long time, especially when you consider those particular roots, one in the [Black] Panther Party and one in groups like SDS.
UoF: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but based on what I’ve read about the United Freedom Front, it sounds like you guys achieved a huge number of successful actions and evaded capture for longer than many other groups. Is that correct? Why that was the case?
RLL: It is correct. In fact, I think that’s one of our main claims to fame, really, is the length of time we were underground. Because we weren’t just hiding. We were the number one fugitives they wanted in the country. After the first couple years we became number one. As the other groups got picked off or decommissioned in one way or another, those forces of repression can focus more and more on you. Plus we were very active, we were always doing something and they knew it. High-risk stuff. We had developed means that if we had just wanted to be underground just to live away from the eyes and ears of the government, we could have done that indefinitely, because we had the methods down so well. But our justification for being underground was to be active. I wouldn’t be underground if I couldn’t stay active. So we were constantly carrying out actions of one kind or another throughout the whole time, including many close calls. And when you look at groups, even within the BLA itself, which was more extensive than we were, and they were around for a considerable period of time, but individual cells within the BLA, a lot of ’em went down really quick. But they were large enough where they could absorb the loss and keep going.
We were smaller, we couldn’t handle too many hits. You know what I mean? When you go up against the repressive arm of this government, they have all the money, the resources, the manpower, the computer power. They can make mistake after mistake after mistake. I can sit in and talk to you about the strategic and tactical mistakes the FBI and other police made in trying to get us. But because of that foundation, the endless supply of funding and police power, weaponry and intelligence, all of it, they can make mistake after mistake, and just go back to the drawing board and do it again. When you’re a small organization, there’s very little margin of error for you. You can make one mistake and it all comes tumbling down.
Now, to give you an idea in terms of even Weather and BLA, which had had pretty good resources, the Brinks case really was like, if you look at it, it’s like all of a sudden the dominoes started falling. A huge part of their total underground infrastructure just went down around that one action. So you don’t have the room to make those kinds of mistakes. I think it’s really to our credit that we were underground for ten years. I mean, what other group can you see that did that and was politically active for that entire period of time and with a number one target on our backs almost the whole time?
Expropriation was a part of our strategy, and that’s different than certain clandestine formations that got their funding a different way. When you look at Weather, some of that money obviously came from some pretty wealthy family members and friends, that was part of the network, right? There’s a difference in building revolutionary power, trying to build a clandestine armed movement. You’re building a different kind of revolutionary when you fund yourself through armed actions that target financial institutions to uphold capitalism as opposed to having Uncle John send you $10,000 stipend every month. And you can extrapolate from that into the nonprofit industrial complex. I know some really good people and good organizations that are nonprofits and they skimp to get by to do some really good community work. But there are a lot of nonprofits where the money just rolls in regularly every month, some grant, some foundation, to pay your pretty decent salary and all the benefits that are accrued with it…it makes for a different organization. It makes for a different mindset. Anyways, where were we?
UoF: Not to oversimplify, but I think you could say that guerrillas inside of the imperial core take two distinct paths — one, those who think revolution is impossible within the core, and their primary goal is to give as much material support to Third World revolutionaries, without the expectation that the masses here will join them. And two, those who may share the primary goal of materially supporting Third World revolutionaries, but also think revolution is possible within the core and aim to win popular support and grow their ranks. Of course there has been a lot of internal disagreement on these questions within some of the formations we’re talking about. And in the so-called United States it’s more complex than, say, Denmark, because it’s built on settler colonialism. The “working class” here is still largely pacified by imperial super profits but there are also internal colonies with far more revolutionary potential because they are fighting national liberation struggles. How did you all conceptualize revolution here, and how did the UFF relate to the Third World national liberation struggles, including those internal to the US?
RLL: Well, when I was part of it, we were trying to build a revolutionary resistance movement. We were anti-imperialists. So much is based on time, place, and conditions. If you don’t factor in time, place, and conditions into things, you can get off the mark really well, including with armed actions and stuff. You’ve got to factor these three components in to make decisions about how you’re going to move. At that time we’re talking, if you go back to SM-JJ [Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit], you’re talking early, mid-seventies, and then all the way up to UFF [United Freedom Front].
The last UFF action was 1984. It’s an interesting communiqué that UFF put out. They hit Union Carbide, which was a big mining company in South Africa, Amerikan-owned multinational, and the communiqué answer the call to all parts of the anti-apartheid movement that existed at that time and any progressive revolutionary people that. It was really coming together pretty well, this aboveground anti-apartheid movement in the US at the time. But this communiqué was encouraging that [aboveground] movement to continue, while recognizing that we’re trying to build a multifaceted anti-imperialist movement, which for us necessitated a clandestine sector that was armed, armed for self-defense, and armed for offensive actions and that they were not mutually exclusive, that they should compliment each other. Multilevel, we’re at different levels, but we’re part of the same movement. So we encouraged the BDS movement at the time, students, workers, etc, to keep at it the same way because we were going to keep it at it as well.
In terms of that anti-imperialist view from going back to the seventies into the eighties, we clearly really took our view of things based a lot on the national liberation struggles of the time. When you go back then, they were all over the world, anti-colonial struggles included in that. Just look at Africa: Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola. To us, these Third World national liberation struggles were a cutting edge of resisting and fighting back against US imperialism as it spread throughout the world. Each one of those countries that liberated itself was going to weaken US imperialism to some degree. And our role in part was to be supportive of those struggles. International solidarity, if you need a term for it. That was how we considered ourselves; they’re the vanguard, we’re the rear guard. The rear guard because we’re in the Belly of the Beast, we’re the US, we have some responsibility politically, morally, personally to do something, to attack the same system that’s being attacked by these revolutionary movements. It’s a unique position to be within the US and try to fight on the same field of battle, so to speak, in support of these liberation struggles.
The great thinkers and guerrilla fighters that came out of these struggles [in the Third World] had a lot of influence on our own political vision and analysis. I was looking at the reading list on the Unity of Fields website. I can tell you, I’ve read many of those books. Everything from Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. These were tremendously influential on us because Urban Guerrilla Warfare was relatively new at that time. It was like opening up a new area. George Jackson says, I think in Blood in my Eye, that the urban landscape can conceal a guerrilla as well as the jungle canopy. And we took that to heart.
What came after liberation in each of those countries, you know, we paid a lot of attention to the groups made up the different movements in the different colonies and different countries, because sometimes there would be multiple organizations. Obviously we would favor the political view of one group usually, but it wasn’t our job to put that out there. That was just to enable us to see what direction things were going in, and which organizations in these movements had the best prospects of really freeing the people there. So what came after liberation, we didn’t delve into, other than you’re freeing up a colony, you’re freeing up a people, which means self-determination for the first time for these people so that they are in a position, once they liberate themselves from foreign conflict, colonization or intervention, then they are much better suited to determine by themselves the direction they want to take to put that liberation into real terms for their people. Our actions were meant to keep those liberation struggles on the agenda in this country, both with the left and as much of the general public as we could reach through what we were doing.
I think you mentioned the internal colonies as well, and that somewhat unique situation. Not all the underground groups from that period looked at internal colonies the same way. Even within certain organizations, it generally might not be completely unified on a position on the internal colonies. Our position was that Black people in this country do compromise an internal colony. So we’re looking at Black people, what do they want? What are the Black radical groups saying? What are they doing? Recognizing that somebody’s internally colonized is different than offering a format to deal with that. So it wasn’t our position to offer that format, our position was to support a freedom struggle. If you look at the position papers and communiqués and underground papers from that era, you’ll see that there is support for the national liberation of all of those internal colonies.
We did get very involved with the Puerto Rican struggle, which is a little bit different in the sense that you have the diaspora here, you have a huge number of Puerto Ricans in this country, but the island is the land base of the nation. How they were going to deal with the diaspora, that comes with liberating your national borders. That’s the way I see it, anyways. We were really supportive of Puerto Rican independence and the release of the Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners that were kept at that time, Lolita LeBron and the others, and in fact, we were charged with quite a few actions around Puerto Rican independence. That we felt was very material support given as many Puerto Ricans in this country. My number one goal has been dismantle this fucking imperialist system. I think the internal colonies are a potential Achilles heel of imperialism right within its own borders.
UoF: Absolutely agree. I was going to ask you a question about the state of the Palestine solidarity movement in this country, and I think that’s actually very related to our discussion about the internal colonies. Because the most useful thing we could do here for Palestine, for any Third World national liberation struggle, is to make a revolution here — to dismantle US imperialism from within. And obviously the internal colonies, now and historically, have the most revolutionary potential, so that goes hand in hand.
I think the “Palestine solidarity movement,” as they call it, is coming up against the limitations of its own form. I’m not trying to say this in a defeatist way because I also think the movement has made great advances, but those advances have led us to this impasse or breaking point. The movement has failed in part by not addressing this issue of internal colonialism, by not universalizing the Palestinian struggle into a broader anti-imperialist struggle. That failure has manifested itself most clearly in the movement’s weak positions on the police, on resistance to the police, and on whether militancy should take place here at all. There’s a lot of rhetorical support for resistance far away, but not when it takes place here, which is why the movement also ignores a lot of the political prisoners in Amerikan dungeons, like Casey Goonan. And to be clear, when I say “movement,” I’m mostly talking about the nonprofit industrial complex, which is why I don’t even like using the term “movement” really, and I appreciated your critique of nonprofits earlier and how reformist they tend to become. But back to my point — we’ll be chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied” at police-permitted and peace-police-marshalled parades without acknowledging that the Amerikan police are the domestic occupying force of the internal colonies here. That idea leads us to the logical conclusiont hat we should be resisting the police, and I don’t think these nonprofits actually really want people to do that, because like you said, they care about their grant money and their bottomline.
When we were chatting the other week, you were also comparing how you and your comrades would be policed for supporting the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) and waving their flags at protests to how we are now told not to wave our Hezbollah flags or wear Hamas or PFLP headbands. So this kind of conditional “solidarity” that is actually anti-resistance is definitely not a new phenomenon, although the existence of the terror lists and designations has made people all the more scared of resistance, or given them more excuses to shy away from openly supporting it.
But yeah, I guess I’m wondering what you think of the Palestine solidarity movement now, especially in this current wave of repression. Do you think the movement can transcend the limits of its current framework, its single issueism, really break out into a broader anti-imperialist movement?
RLL: Important question. Well, the Palestine solidarity movement, I mean, I’m not the best judge of this in my current situation. You could be a better judge of it than me. I don’t know.
I used to get into it with activists from New York a lot because I detected this attitude among some that New York was the center of the universe, and what people do outside of the center of that universe somehow doesn’t quite measure up to what’s up in New York. And it’s not just with somebody like me who lives in rural Maine, but I got friends and comrades in Boston and they get to sometimes the same way that they feel like, especially when they’re working with people and they want to put an event together. “Oh, is this is going to be New York or Boston,” and Boston seems to play in second field all the time and it sort irritates them. Or you get over into the Bay Area, it is very different being a radical in a place like rural Maine. I think I could mesh in much easier in the city like New York or the Bay Area that has a lot of old radicals, but in a place like Maine, it’s like you’re the only game in town. That’s why its fricking media and the cops still know who I am despite the time that’s gone by.
But anyways, first of all, I’m going to say this question has come up even here in Maine, and we have some very committed activists here to figuring out which way forward, examining and reexamining actions that people are involved with. Everything from cultural events to CD [civil disobedience] where people get arrested and all these marches and all these rallies. I saw the piece on PSL in Unity of Fields and apparently there’s some differences there over strategy. I mean, PSL is here. I know some of them, I knew ’em before they were PSL. PSL hasn’t been around in any significant numbers until relatively recently. I mean it predates October 2023, but they hadn’t been around and they’re recruiting. When it comes to which way forward with Palestine solidarity, it’s still a work in progress as various groups hold a range of strategies and tactics. It’s an issue here in Maine and people talk about it because they want to build on what’s happened so far.
The positive thing that I see is that I have never seen so much support, I’ll use it generically, the word “support,” and awareness around the Palestinian liberation struggle as I see now. That’s happened since October of 2023. I’ve seen it manifested in many different ways and I’ve also seen it in other parts of the country. I’m in touch with activists in other parts of the country. I’m seeing the same thing there. I could take it a step further and see it also in significant parts of the world.
Because historically among the left, and I’m not talking about different party lines between different sectarian groups who want to argue to death over some line, I’m talking about substantive issues — you couldn’t find a lefty group in this country that wasn’t opposed to apartheid South Africa. But as the years passed by, Palestine was always, and forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but to put it in New York terms, Palestine was always considered the third rail of left politics.
You know, the third rail in the subway, you touch a third rail and you’re instantly fried, you die. Periodically somebody does that in the subway system and that’s what happens to them. I personally know somebody who happened to die that way. In the NYPD investigation of how he died, they said he tripped and fell on it. This was a young anarchist kid that I knew. This is quite a few years ago. While his comrade was saying no, he got jumped and pushed on it. But in any event, you touch it, you die.
So if you were a supporter of Palestine, you risked being ostracized by people, either individually within a group or by another group. It was always like you could give Palestine a certain amount of rhetorical support in your publication or whatever, but don’t get too heavy-handed with it. Don’t push the resistance too much and don’t push the one [Palestinian] state too much and those kind of things. If you did, then you risk being ostracized politically by other leftists.
I’ve seen that starting to go by the wayside for the first time in my life. I’ve never seen this level of support before. I understand we’d have to go qualify it by going through what do I mean by support? You know what I mean? This and this. But I mean you take ten different ways that people can be supportive from financial to cultural to CD [civil disobedience] to every kind of thing in between, then I think there’s a big positive. It’s a positive, it can be built on, people are trying to build on it, it could grow even more.
I mean, we don’t know what’s going on in Palestine until next week gets here. So much is up in the air right now. None of it seems good, but I think that’s been a pretty amazing thing. You could say, yeah, well, a lot of these people are basic liberals and maybe their idea of Palestine solidarity is to keep writing to their Congress person to vote to stop arms to israel or write a letter to the editor or whatever. I don’t discourage any of that kind of stuff. I just push people to do more. Or I don’t push, I used to push. I try to persuade people to do more. So I think that’s really good.
I think part of the reason you’re seeing the repression amped up, it’s not just because Trump is here, it’s because they’re worried about that level of support [for Palestine] and that’s why they’re coming after people to the extent that they are. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way, I think it’s going to get worse, but I still think that they are predominantly focused on low-hanging fruit. I hate to use that term, but I’ll use it. I’m accustomed to this because I was a prisoner for a long time and I see them do a lot of things to prisoners that people out here just don’t care about, don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and it’s out of sight, out of mind, it’s prisoners, the lower end of everybody. And then five years later they’re doing the same thing to people outside of prison. I can talk about surveillance technologies and all kinds of stuff. They’ll experiment with the prisons first. That’s the low-hanging fruit because we’re the most vulnerable, we’re the most marginalized.
What they’re doing now, especially with the deportation stuff, is they’re targeting people. Totally make up a fucking story. But they’re going after people they know are vulnerable because they’re not a US citizen yet, or they can manipulate a law even if they got a green card or whatever to deport them. Something like this happened with the Red Scare with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and various anarchists and communists that were put on boats, just rounded up and put on boats, and sent to other countries. I think that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing this repression, and it’s a great cause for concern because of the level of fear it induces and also because we have to come to the defense of these people that are being subjected to this repression.
It’s a moral and political obligation that we do that. But it also requires resources. It also requires our attention, our time, our money, whatever support we can muster to defend people that are going to being targeted by this repression. That’s not to say that we should do any less, we should do more to defend people that are under attack. If you follow Cop City at all, you know what I’m talking about. All these people that are being deported could eventually prevail in their case, but the government still has succeeded in disrupting movement activities, scaring people that may be involved away. To them, they look at it like a win-win situation. If they can deport somebody and keep them out, that’s a win. But even if that person comes back, they figure they’d want something because he may be back, but they scared 20 people away, or they tied up people in organizations, tied those resources up, so they can’t be used for anything else.
So I think that the potential is still there right now, despite the repression. I talked about time, place, and conditions — we didn’t have this internet before, we have to get on the fucking internet on a daily basis to find out how those conditions are changing. If you don’t have a good grasp of conditions, then it’s difficult to put together tactical and strategic plans of any kind. And it changes so much. But I think the potential is still there. This movement can grow now.
Single-issue? Yeah, I mean I have to think of the Vietnam War because there were so many people. I was a state coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and my Vietnam veteran partner in that had been a highly decorated army helicopter pilot. I was already an anti-imperialist by the time I got involved with VVAW. And this brother, he was strictly a single-issue person. He wanted to bring this war to an end and it had a moral base to it to a certain degree. He had studied to be a Jesuit before he got hooked into the military and he had strong moral objections to the US being in Vietnam and what they were doing there. I mean combined together, we made some really formidable presentations and worked all well together. But the minute that all was done, that was it. That was the end of his political activism. I immediately jumped. I didn’t wait until the war to be completely over, but it was obviously going to be. I already had made my way into working around the criminal legal system, prisoners and all of that. This was in the seventies when the prisoners rights thing was really big. That turned out to be a good move politically because I never looked at the war as a single issue. To me it was always connected. I just looked at my fucking training, and when I was in Vietnam, to know that white supremacy ran through the whole fricking war. It was white supremacy, racism on a massive scale. It was embedded into us in our training before we even got there. But yeah, I think that that is a problem probably, well, it depends how you look at it, whether it’s a problem or not. It’s a problem in terms of building an anti-imperialist movement. It’s probably a problem for these sectarian groups, including groups like PSL that obviously are involved in more than one issue. When you bring somebody into your organization or group or whatever, this is where political education comes in, really. You got to have political education I feel.
A lot of people could be resistant to that, but I think that’s a good method in which to solidify people’s views about the system and making the connections. Most of the public speaking I do, I just did a class yesterday, it’s focused on prisons and I work in other stuff. I can’t when it’s an academic presentation, which it was, I got an hour and a quarter, and so I can’t go too far afield or I’m not meeting the qualifications of that particular class. I have to keep the focus on this issue, connecting it to larger issues in the criminal legal system, but also connecting it to the issue that are political prisoners in the US, because I always give a very quick thumbnail sketch of my background, my backstory as I call it. I open up, I didn’t just get here yesterday, you know what I mean? I was just a kid from a mill town and this war is originally what turned me on, then being in prison a year after I got out of the army, those dots were connected for me. So they see that right away that I have a more expansive view than just prison. But yeah, I don’t know how big an issue it needs to be right now. How many of these people are going to bail out on Palestine when we get to wherever we’re getting to?
I mean, I’m dealing with some people like that here. The best thing I’ve seen happen is that so many generic anti-war people are doing vigils and stuff. I first ran into them when I got out in 2004 because we were doing them around Iraq, then it was Afghanistan, and they’re against the armaments industry, but they can be pretty generic about it, with their signs and their talk. But I’ve seen some of them cross over into the Palestine issue, which is a big step for some of them. They tend to be politically, how should I put this? Politically, they emphasize nonviolence rather than liberation. I’m going to put it that way. If you’re an anti-imperialist, you emphasize liberation. And resistance to imperialism can be violent or it can be nonviolent. It can be both. But I don’t make a fetish out of nonviolence either philosophically or as a practical manner. Some of these people are crossing over, which is encouraging.
I’m not sure if I’m getting to the issue. We started talking about the demonstration [I went to in Maine recently]. People were showing up from different organizations with all kinds of different issues. I didn’t have any problem with people talking about losing their jobs and social security and healthcare, not war. I understand those issues, but I think the challenge in terms of recruiting people or encouraging people to get involved in Palestine solidarity is you have to be able to show them how it’s related, why Palestine is related to George Floyd, you know what I mean?
UoF: A connection Yahya Sinwar made himself, in one of his last interviews with Western press before the Al-Aqsa Flood. He said in 2021, “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used (by the zionist entity) against the Palestinians.”
RLL: Yeah, you have to do that. I’ve been doing it in one form or another, going back to when I first became politically active. I became active on three fronts — the Vietnam War, the labor struggle, and civil rights. And so that shows right away that as soon as I got politically active in 1968, after I got out of the army, I was connecting the issues right away. So was the organization I was part of, Southern Student Organizing Committee, which sometimes is called a Southern SDS, but I don’t think that’s a really good description. And so our pamphlets and everything reflected that. We had pamphlets by Che Guevara, the Tricontinental Speech, Malcolm X, the history of IWW, whatever that general political education that these issues are related. And I think that long-term, wherever this direction goes with Palestine, is going to be a necessity for solidarity work with Palestine, for a Palestine. It’s going to continue for a long time. You learn from experience and I’ve been around quite a few people who are pretty capable and you can chew gum and walk at the same time other you can do be involved with some other kind of issue as well. We shouldn’t be in a competition to, well, if you’re with this group, you can’t do this over here. If you’re with us, you can’t do that over there. I don’t want to get into too much of that.
UoF: Yeah, totally. We do need unity. And when we say that we mean unity in resistance, not just unity for unity’s sake, which I feel like is what you’re getting to. Everything you’ve said is really reaffirming why we thought it was so important to do this interview because with all this new repression coming down, we certainly are in a new stage, but we’re seeing some people talk about it as if it’s unprecedented when it’s very, very precedented. Maybe people are saying this because because we don’t know our own history, so these historical examples of repression and counter-repression are crucial to study. Our lives depend on it. And we’re really grateful you’re sharing all your experiences. Getting back to the UFF, we were talking about how yall managed to evade capture and stay underground for so long. As our movement is experiencing more surveillance and infiltration, I think this could be really useful advice to people engaged in all sorts of different tactics, so I was wondering if you could speak to how yall vetted people and dealt with infiltration or traitorship.
RLL: That’s been the bane of a number of organizations. The worst snitches are not the ones that you manage to identify or that prove themselves unworthy after they’ve become involved in some kind of one form or another with clandestine work. [The worst snitches are] the people who break after the shit goes down. In other words, a person could be underground for three years, have participated in all kinds of stuff, been dependable, get busted, and they’ll sit him in a fucking room, slap him a couple of times, and they start talking and they’re going to slap him again to shut him up. In other words, they’re passed certain tests and are vetted, so to speak, through actually doing things, but when the heat dial hits a certain level, especially if you are arrested or captured and all of a sudden you are looking at enormous amount of time—just to give you one example, in a very bad prison, that kind of thing—and somebody completely falls apart.That’s a critical question because you’re talking about trust. The deeper in you are, and I don’t mean just underground, there’s a lot of people that get indicted or dragged before grand juries that are aboveground people, some who violate the law and some who don’t. They love fucking conspiracy laws in this country because they’re easy to convict people on. So why do people use Signal? Presumably to give them some kind of protection against conspiracy charges, right? I mean, I won’t get into that. I’ve been charged with conspiracy, different kinds of conspiracies and I know how the law works and that’s a favorite tactic.
In terms of clandestinity, you’re talking about much higher risk and much more serious consequences generally speaking in that kind of situation. So a vetting process procedure is more serious. The gate somebody has to go through to assume a role underground should be fairly vigorous. And this is an issue I touch on in my book because it is so important and there’s no one size that fits all. There’s no particular test that will guarantee you that you are protected against somebody. I mean, there’s various kinds of informants and agents, provocateur or whatnot. If you go back and you look at these groups, a lot of them did have snitches rise out of ’em. In a way, the ones I feel that hurt the most, I mean if somebody comes in, they’re an undercover agent and you get set up and you get busted, that sucks, that hurts, but that’s not going to hurt the way your closest friend in your whole life flips and testifies against you. That really hurts. Or to set you up in a way where one of your comrades get killed or injured or busted, ends up in a fourty-year sentence, whatever. And that kind of betrayal is very difficult to flesh it out because it really comes down to an issue primarily of character. You have to assess a person’s character and you don’t know what somebody’s going to be like for sure until they’ve passed a trial under fire. I’ve known soldiers, conventional soldiers in the United States Army that got grade A’s all through basic and advanced training to be a soldier, fundamental part of learning how to kill somebody. But then when they come under actual enemy fire, they fall completely to pieces, where another trainee soldier who just kind of grunted and just kept their head down and nobody noticed him and he just got through basic training, advanced training and nothing special, nothing else stands out about him, but under fire after training in the real war, they rise above the others. They are able to do everything that a good soldier is supposed to do in a war situation under fire.
So it’s really hard. That comes down to a character issue. And a lot of those other groups got burned. They got burned both ways. They got burned because they recruited the wrong people who turned out pretty quickly to be weak, undependable. They were alright until some cop starts twisting their arm and puts them on a hot seat and they break down and give up information, give up people. Part of it is like being spoken for, recruiting people that others can vouch for. That’s an important thing. Assuming the people that are vouching for them have proven their own selves in one way or another and a trusted comrade, that’s the best referral you can get unless you are coming into the group somebody grew up with or something they’ve known forever or whatever. Because trust is the basic thing. Nobody in our cases ever flipped and they had a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure, because we had kids involved too. And then you got both parents looking at a huge amount of pressures and years to flip and turn government witness. We didn’t have any. Our policy was “Give us 24 hours.” Meaning that we understand that every human is likely to have a breaking point when it comes to brutality and torture. So, a captive holding out for at least 24 hours or longer gives others a chance to dump anything that could be compromised and move on to safety. I think it important to include this because it’s part of the security code but also shows we are not insensitive to those who suffer severe consequences because of their commitment.
We had a snitch. We had people, aboveground support people, who basically testified for grand juries. That’s a whole other issue, but it’s related to this. We used to see a lot of use by the government of grand juries to particularly go after aboveground people seeking information on both the aboveground support networks for the clandestine and for anything they knew about people underground themselves.
But we had one person who flipped early on, and I write about this in my book because this person came to us recommended, but he should have never been recruited. At some point I was starting to notice this person’s character was weak. A number of things happened that told me this person is weak. He was too mouthy, too pushy about we got to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this. You know what I mean? When we didn’t have the capacity to do it, he’s trying to push us into doing actions that at the time would’ve been over our head. So I talked to another comrade about it. He was feeling the same way, this is when it can get dangerous. You’re talking about an armed clandestine movement here, armed organizations, different ways to deal with different disciplinary issues underground. And you got to be very careful and conscientious about how you do it.
There was another unit operating in the same general area as we were. We had a liaison between them and I was really getting uncomfortable with this guy. The other unit expressed interest in him. The guy that I’m talking about, the recruit, the person of bad character, I feel, I told the liaison take him if you want him, but I told the other group, through the liaison, I got questions about this guy’s character. I don’t know, if he’ll hold up, you should know that. The other person in the other group, they wanted him. So we dumped him and the minute he made that change over, we abandoned the safe house. He knew this one safe house where several of us lived and I was so concerned about him that we decided to dump that house, because that was the one place he knew. So if he did collaborate, that’s all he could lead them to and we’d be gone. So he fell in with this other group and I was clear to the other group, we don’t want anything more to do with him. We could have taken more drastic action, but that’s a whole other issue that I don’t want to get into for this. This guy was like all he wanted do was actions, get out there, get out there, boom, hit him again, boom, hit them again. This other group was into that kind of philosophy. I knew there was going to be a problem there. So we cut the liason off and sure enough they got down in the city and they just went to town and they went way beyond that capacity. They were going big there for a few weeks, but it all came crashing down.
This guy I was telling you about was busted with some of the others and part of a aboveground support network. They got into the police barracks, scared him, and the guy never stopped talking. I got his completely grand jury testimony. He buried that whole other group. They all went to prison and broke it up as an organization. At least one person in the aboveground group went to prison. And sure enough, they found that safe house, which we had up on the Canadian border and they went in it. But by the time that happened, we had been gone two or three months by then. He completely turned weak, sold everybody out, and then started lying so that he could incriminate more people and try to incriminate me. He starts lying.
But the underlying factor in all this is desperation. If you can’t recruit when you’re underground or doing any other sensitive stuff — unless your philosophy is we’re going to have a group of two or three people, that’s it, that’s going to be enough to do what we want do the way we want to do it, we don’t need anything more than that — but if you’re trying to build a movement, you need something larger than that. That means you need recruits. And we were desperate for a recruit at the time. He first came in with us, referred to by somebody who’s judgment I trusted, and he was a trustworthy person, he never snitched or anything like that, but his judgment wasn’t the greatest. So when you recruit from a position of desperation, then you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to lower the bar when you evaluate a person. Can this person hold up to this kind of way of living underground, to do the kind of things that is going to be required of that person to do? The minute you start lowering the bar, the risk is greater that you’re going to pull somebody in that’s going to burn you somewhere down the line.
The same thing with an action. Let’s say an expropriation. The worst time to do an expropriation is when you are desperate. You don’t even have next month’s rent. And that’s all tied into your security. If you can’t pay the rent and you get thrown out, you can’t be out on the street. You’re desperate. So you try to avoid that situation. You have enough of a bankroll from expropriations that you are not that desperate to go out and do that again. You’ve got to do it at a time when you have the resources to do it right. It’s the same thing with recruiting people. Don’t let yourself get so politically desperate to have this person or two more people into a group that you’re going to lower the standards, lower the bar in terms of what you’ve determined it takes from your own experience to do the work that would be required of this person.
Fortunately there was nobody else after him with us that did that. When we recruited again later, we had had a lot of experience by then and we needed other people, but we didn’t get to the point where we were desperate. We needed it but we had years of experience — we knew pretty much the requirements of a person to live underground with a lot of heat on you and to do the kinds of things that are necessary. A lot of that stuff is stuff that even aboveground activists don’t know because they haven’t been through the experience — how many ways you can make yourself look and sound different, everything you need to know about fictitious identification and on and on, right down to the littlest details. We had documents, you’ll find some of this in my archives at UMass, they were like little training manuals for new recruits. So the people were given some orientation period to what would be required of them because people don’t have much experience with underground. And the lack of experience has cost people their lives underground.
UoF: That was so useful, I think to a lot of people reading this who are doing all different kinds of work. The points you make about how being aboveground or being a public-facing spokesperson does not mean you are safe is really important. A lot of the people we’re seeing get abducted right now were those public facing people and were in fact sometimes very moderate politically and they’re still being targeted. It’s not just people doing direct action that need to be preparing for grand jury resistance, etc, that sort of repression will target our movement at every level.
I wanted to close out maybe by asking you about why the UFF was originally named the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, if you could speak to the significance of these two freedom fighters. I know you just read the interview we did with Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr.
RLL: Well, Jonathan Jackson was really very influential on me, even before I went underground. Not only with me, but with others, especially those of us who were underground, to the point where Tom Manning and Carol Manning who were part of our group named their son who was born underground after him. His son was born underground. Thinking about kids, it’s a whole other subject, right? One thing I learned underground was, and I learned it from my partner, this is the kind of thing that a normal aboveground person would not think of, that a very pregnant woman can move better underground and faster than a woman with a two or three-weeks-old child. And we actually learned that from experience.
Now, who contemplating going underground is thinking about something like that? I mean, this goes back to what I was saying, before we get off into a hundred things about living that life. But Jonathan was the inspiration, as I told you about, for our coded secret dating system. It was based on a calendar that was, and you can see, George’s words in the back of his last page of his book, in Soledad Brother, that the death of Jonathan was such an important event it need to be noted on our calendars, ad infinitum, in other words, forever. So we developed a calendar based on that, that began with the first day after Jonathan’s death.*
Jonathan, as a 17-year-old manchild coming from a colonized nation, an internal colony, he really represented and signified and epitomized Carlos Marighella’s words, that “The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Without initiative there is no action. Jonathan, he has the kind of heart that it takes to be a revolutionary it takes to sacrifice and live that commitment and to the fullest. He was a 17-year-old version of Carlos Margighella, really, in a way.
I remember an interview with Jonathan Jackson from a very long time ago. I don’t remember the publication, but this was when he was working on the Soledad Brothers’ case, and I remember him being asked why he was so angry, and why he was so militant, something to that effect. And his answer was, “What would you do if it was your brother?” That resonated with me, and I felt that deeply, and I still do. Because to make the kind of sacrifice that he made, to make that commitment and then that sacrifice, to put it all on the line, to rescue those brothers, to free those brothers from the Marin County Courthouse, that’s as much heart as you can bring into anything. And if you had a hundred like him, you could probably take some very significant steps and forward movement to bringing this whole fucking system down.
That’s the kind of heart it takes. That’s a warrior’s heart, and there’s different ways to express it. But the thing that he said, when he said “What if it was your brother,” he’s trying to get people that don’t quite wrap their head around liberating Black captives using firearms. They can’t quite wrap their head around it. So he phrased it that way. To him, it could be his brother George, or it could have been William Christmas or Ruchell Magee because they were there too. But that’s the essential core of a revolutionary, is to identify really strongly, emotionally with oppressed people.
In the cases that I was involved with around, let’s say, the slaughter that was going on in Central America in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at the time — I’m going to telling the jury this. I represent myself. I can give my own statements. I don’t identify with the ruling class in this country, the Ronald Reagans and the elites of either party, the fucking collaborators, whether the head of unions or head of associations or whatever they were the head. Who I identified with were the campesinos that were struggling and fighting for the own liberation in Central America, be they Mayans in Guatemala or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You have to have that feeling, and it’s part of what enabled me to do what I did blissfully and wish I could do more, because that’s what my love was, that’s what my feeling was for these people. And Jonathan was like that. I mean, he was like a hero, that’s an overused word these days, but he really was, a great inspiration to us.
UoF: It reminds me of what George said about martyrdom, that we shouldn’t cry, we should celebrate, we should only be sad that it’s taken so long for people willing to make those sacrifices to arrive. “These comrades must make the first contribution. They will be the first to fall. We gather up their bodies, clean them, kiss them and smile. Their funerals should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. We should be sad only that it’s taken us so many generations to produce them.”
RLL: Yeah. I’ve ran into this because I’ve done so much work around political prisoners, and it’s an abstract thing to a lot of people, and I always use the term our political prisoners, because to really be inspired enough to do any solidarity support work around political prisoners in this country, especially if you haven’t done any, you’ve got to take that first step to understand why you need to support activists when they’re imprisoned, and you look at other countries, just look at Palestine, you get a good example. They embrace their imprisoned people. They don’t marginalize them. So I always tell people, these are our political prisoners. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with every fricking thing that they did tactically or strategically or anything else. I mean, if somebody goes to prison for sabotaging the Dakota Pipeline, I may not have the same politics as them, but I totally understand what’s going on here and whose side I’m on, and then that person needs support. So I say, these are our prisoners. This is how you have to think about it. These are our prisoners.
So when I used to look at what was happening in Central America, I’m not looking at like, oh, these foreigners down here. These are people that our struggle is meant to provide some kind of support for, to expose the truth of what’s happening to them, to expose the government’s criminal enterprise and criminal activity that’s destroying these people, taking their lives from them. You have to have that sort of heart to heart connection. It has to beyond abstract. It doesn’t mean that you have to have a gun in your hand as Jonathan did on that particular day, but it means that to be able to step up, do more work, make more sacrifices of your time, your resources — whatever you need to see people like that.
I was doing stuff that I had never done before. The battlefield had completely changed. To me, once you get ensnared into that criminal legal system and you’re looking at trials and stuff, to me, it’s an extension of the battlefield you just left. And the battlefield I just left, the underground, the odds were always against us. We were always outgunned, outnumbered, outresourced. It was the David versus Goliath kind of situation. I get into captivity and I realize this is an extension of that same battlefield. I’m outgunned, outnumbered, out, resourced. They’re trying to like hell to destroy me and my comrades. And so the tactics have to change, the strategy has to change, but it’s the same struggle, just on a different plane. And then when you get to prison, same thing there, it changes again and the odds to increase against you again, and you have to make it work there.
And in prison, it always goes back to the same thing we thought about earlier, political education. I never knew a political prisoner in prison doing any kind of years that didn’t engage in political education and tried to get little groups going or exchanges, depending on the situation you were in, with people who were there for offenses that were not political, but to try to change their consciousness, especially with the youngsters.
Of course, George is very big on this in his book. I mean, he really goes on about the importance of political education in that situation. Sam Melville was also an influence on me. I did not know Sam Melville personally, but my admiration for him stems as much, if not more, from his role in Attica than his relatively brief underground years. Although I have to admire anybody that bombed United Fruit, which he did, it goes by a different name now. But I mean, when you look at what has been designated as a genocide directed to Mayan people by the US-backed regime in Guatemala in the eighties, I mean, that’s where United Fruit was from. They owned fucking Guatemala. And so I was pleased to see that. If you’re reading Sam’s history, you realize he made some mistakes as he wasn’t real well acquainted with living and operating underground, and he stood up through all of it. I think it comes down, and this applies to Jonathan too, but Sam Melville, despite whatever personal deficiencies he had, he was a person of principle.
I can tell you from my own experience, and when I was going into the last part of the last year that I was underground, the tenth year, the writing sort of was on the wall. Most of the underground groups that were operating on any level at all when we first went underground were decommissioned. People were in prison, some died, some just scattered. The network of groups that existed was down to very little in 1984. In fact, it only continued on into ’85 and not really beyond that.
Part of the hopes of building something, I’m looking at it in 1984, and the people that I thought would still be there were gone, and they hadn’t been replaced. I knew then that our hopes of really setting up a network of clandestine groups, anti-imperialist clandestine groups that could go even much farther than 10 years, was almost a pipe dream at that point. But I kept going because of principle. Apartheid still existed in South Africa, and the slaughters going on in Central America were still happening. I would justify it to myself personally, I felt that as a matter of principle, I was not going to give up the struggle at that point. I was going to keep going, even if it was only based on a matter of principle, even if the material conditions were just absolutely not there anymore, beyond just basic survival to build anything more, I was still going to keep going, at least for the immediate future, which of course ended on November 4th, 1984.
UoF: We ended the interview here. *Ray emailed us this note after:
FYI: On the last letter, last page of Soledad Brother George writes:
August 9, 1970 Real Date, 2 days A.D.
Dear Joan, We reckon all time in the future from the day of the man-child’s death.
We devised a dating system based on this which took an FBI counter-terrorism resource center months to figure out, simple as it is.
In our NY trial the prosecutor presenting their closing statement to the jury brought up that 2 of our comrades/defendants had the audacity to name their son after Jonathan Jackson who kidnapped a judge, etc, etc. His point being that these people are radical extremists who not only engage in political violence, they celebrate it.
Download a zine version to print/fold here:
RLL-1-1Download source: Unity of Fieldshttps://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18717
#antiImperialism #northAmerica #resistance #unitedFreedomFront
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Dreaming:
Old farm house, tossing water out through screened windows, dead-battery trucks that wouldn't start, gimme a jump?
Barbed wire, bullpen wire, welded pipe fences, use this tool to bend the wire.
Where are we getting dinner?
My clothes are wet, better put your phone in a bag if you're going across that stream, it's pretty deep there!
Hey, it's getting dark.
Bing-bong-bing! Phone alarm.
Awaken 5AM cotton-mouth groggy gross sweaty.
Get up.
Again.
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A Eunuch's Dream by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1874, France
Context: This painting, inspired by Charles Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (published in 1721), depicts a eunuch who wanted to marry a harem slave. He experienced a vision of her while smoking his opium pipe, but her little companion holding a knife dripping with blood reminds us that the eunuch’s anatomy precludes the fulfillment of his dream. The outline of a hand next to the signature is a khamsa, a symbol used to ward off evil.
https://quokk.au/c/historygallery/p/508331/a-eunuch-s-dream-by-jean-lecomte-du-nouy-1874-france
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A Eunuch's Dream by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1874, France
Context: This painting, inspired by Charles Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (published in 1721), depicts a eunuch who wanted to marry a harem slave. He experienced a vision of her while smoking his opium pipe, but her little companion holding a knife dripping with blood reminds us that the eunuch’s anatomy precludes the fulfillment of his dream. The outline of a hand next to the signature is a khamsa, a symbol used to ward off evil.
https://quokk.au/c/historygallery/p/508331/a-eunuch-s-dream-by-jean-lecomte-du-nouy-1874-france
-
A Eunuch's Dream by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1874, France
Context: This painting, inspired by Charles Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (published in 1721), depicts a eunuch who wanted to marry a harem slave. He experienced a vision of her while smoking his opium pipe, but her little companion holding a knife dripping with blood reminds us that the eunuch’s anatomy precludes the fulfillment of his dream. The outline of a hand next to the signature is a khamsa, a symbol used to ward off evil.
https://quokk.au/c/historygallery/p/508331/a-eunuch-s-dream-by-jean-lecomte-du-nouy-1874-france