As we watch major media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times bow to the incoming Trump administration, it becomes difficult to image how reality (ie, the facts) will be presented to the public. While I'm happy to give a shout-out to publications (like Talking Points Memo and Rolling Stone) as well as a whole host of substackers for stepping up to the plate, there's one group that is rarely mentioned when discussing the truth-tellers.
Ironically, I was reminded of them by the right wing outlet know as "Newsbusters."
From the beginning of June through the end of December, the late night comedy shows welcomed 120 liberal guests and only one conservative, according to a new NewsBusters study...
The study looked at the five daily late night comedy shows: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
Right on cue, the President-Elect of the United States went on social media last night to rant about one of those comedians - Seth Meyers.
In case you're wondering what Meyers said that triggered Trump, this is probably the episode that did it:
As is often the case with these kinds of monologues, Meyers sprinkled his jokes with some pretty heavy-duty fact-checking on the president's lies. That's also why Trump has repeatedly attacked the other late-night comedians - especially Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
For years now I've been saying that comedians like these are prophets. If you doubt that, I'd simply remind you of Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006.
One of the ways I'll be coping with whatever comes our way over the next four years is to listen to the prophet comedians among us.
When it comes to specifics, Vance mentioned depleted FEMA funds, a wide open southern border, rising oil prices, rising bond yields, and the federal deficit. Here are some facts about those issue:
The current tally for billion-dollar extreme weather disasters in the US is hovering around 23 or 24 so far this year, according to Adam Smith, a climatologist with NOAA who helps compile the government’s count of expensive extreme weather disasters. That number is unofficial and likely to change, but it includes hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton, and it could possibly grow to add a separate complex of earlier severe summer storms.
“This is the most open disasters that I have seen with FEMA, and it’s because we’re seeing an increase in the number of events,” Criswell said Wednesday. “We had an incredibly busy tornado season earlier this year. We had catastrophic and historic levels of flooding across many states this spring as well. We’ve had wildfires across much of the West.”
In other words, climate change is turning "weather events" into "billion-dollar extreme weather disasters." While MAGA is content to blame all of that on DEI, government regulation, and Democrats, the toll that will take on FEMA will continue to rise.
The number of migrants arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in December was lower than when President-elect Donald Trump ended his first term in 2020, according to preliminary figures shared with Reuters, a relative calm that Trump could upend with sweeping changes.
Oil extended gains for a third session on Monday, with Brent crude rising above $80 a barrel to its highest in more than four months, driven by wider U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and the expected effects on exports to top buyers India and China.
Those sanctions were just imposed on Friday. Here's the longer-term picture on oil prices:
[I]ncreases in long-term rates, like the 10-year Treasury rate, might reflect the horrible, creeping suspicion that Donald Trump actually believes the crazy things he says about economic policy and will act on those beliefs...What does this have to do with interest rates? There’s near-unanimity among economists that Trump’s announced agenda of high tariffs, tax cuts and mass deportations would be highly inflationary.
But those facts don't even begin to address the level of Vance's lie. Contrary to the idea that Biden is leaving a dumpster fire, Peter Baker documented that "by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden...is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001."
for the first time in 24 years, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day,
According to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, "President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets."
Here's the question facing Americans: Who are you going to believe? The guy who started the lie about immigrants eating pets, or the facts? The idea that our politics these days comes down to how someone answers that question is enough to drive us all mad.
As Trump and his shadow president Elon Musk break every promise they've made to voters, a lot of liberals claimed that MAGA was about to reach the "find out" phase of FAFO. But it isn't going to happen.
To understand, all we have to do is look at the response to the horrific fires in and around Los Angeles. Here's what's happening:
Climate change has made the vegetation that's driving the LA fires more ready to burn, scientists say.
While the flames are being mainly driven by powerful winds, the new study says that rapid swings between wet and dry years are making trees, shrubs and grasses more vulnerable to ignition.
This "hydroclimate whiplash" has seen decades of drought in California followed by extremely heavy rainfall for two years but then it flipped again to very dry conditions this autumn and winter.
The authors say that climate change has boosted these type of whiplash conditions globally by 31-66% since the middle of the 20th Century.
But that information comes from "scientists," the very people that Trump and MAGA have demonized on everything from climate change to covid.
So Trump took to his social media site to blame California's governor, writing: "Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California...He is the [sic] blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
Meanwhile, on the site formerly known as Twitter, Musk blamed government regulations, LA Mayor Karen Bass, DEI policies, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, and, of course, Gov. Gavin Newsom. Musk even went so far as to agree with Alex Jones, who said that the LA fires were "part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the United States before triggering total collapse."
In summary, they're blaming anyone to the left of MAGA.
Everything Trump/Musk said was a lie. For example, there is no such thing as the "water restoration declaration" and LA doesn't get its water from the North. Musk's claim that Mayor Bass cut the firefighting budget is also a lie.
That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle...
The fact that they're lying won't matter to MAGA - who tend to buy everything these idiots say. So rather than a wake-up call about the dangers of climate change, about half the country will blame Democrats and/or liberals for the devastation these fires unleash.
This is exactly what we can expect for the next four years. Trump's presidency will be a time of crisis and chaos. But rather than deal with the situation, Trump will exhibit the same response we've seen from him over and over again.
[H]ere is the way in which Donald Trump exhibits behaviors associated with a severe personality disorder. He fabricates a world in which he is both dominant and successful. When challenged, he diverts with outrageous lies designed to blame a villain and distract us from his failures. He then assumes we’ll all move on to the next fabrication of his dominance and success.
Lie, distract, and blame...that's what Trump does. It will only get worse this time around as Musk broadcasts the blame game across his social media platform. In the end, rather than hold the president and his oligarchs accountable, MAGA will blame all of their failures on the left.
On this day in 1923, a mob of over 200 white men attacked the Black community in Rosewood, Florida, killing over 30 Black women, men, and children, burning the town to the ground, and forcing all survivors to permanently flee Rosewood.
That was just one of many massacres of Black people in this country.
To that we must add the "4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950."
That's just part of our history that MAGA wants to whitewash. We participate in that when we confine our discussions of the Jim Crow era to talk about segregation. As Hamden Rice once explained.
It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
I thought about that quote from Rice as I read the ProPublica story by Joshua Kaplan about a wilderness survival trainer that spent years undercover with right-wing militias. The whole report is fascinating. But one of the things that stood out to me was that the ranks of these militias were devastated by the prosecution and imprisonment of those involved in the January 6th riot.
They'll obviously get a huge boost when Donald Trump pardons all of them. According to Kaplan, the militias have already been active on our southern border terrorizing immigrants. But they're now gearing up to play an active role in the administration's mass deportation plan. That's like asking the KKK to police segregation in the Jim Crow south.
Does anyone else feel like history might be about to repeat itself?
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall recently took note of the fact that political violence has been on the rise over the last couple of months. For example,
the terrorist attack in New Orleans,
the cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas
the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO
the biggest collection of homemade explosive devices in the FBI's history was found at a home outside Norfolk, Virginia.
Noting this country's long history of political violence, Marshall tried to unravel the threads of what is going on. He suggests that it is a general disinhibition for violence that is the culprit.
I was reminded of something President Biden said a couple of years ago.
Hate never fully goes away. And when given any oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks. In the last few years, we've given it too much oxygen in our politics, in our media, and on the internet. Too much hate, all for power and profit. Too much hate that fueled extremist violence, that's been allowed to fester and grow.
Twenty years ago, Derrick Jensen wrote something similar in his book, "The Culture of Make Believe" (emphasis mine).
Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.
Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remains underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.
That's why it is important to note that, in response to the recent incidents of violence, Trump and his enablers are responding with even more hate.
They're too busy blaming the violence on their usual targets - Biden, immigrants, DEI and public schools - to notice the facts of each case.
But as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, it goes even deeper than an attempt to level blame. He tweeted that Trump is "going to use episodes of violence to justify his crack down on immigrants and his attack on dissent - whether the facts line up or not." He followed that up with this prediction:
In the coming days, watch for autocracy-fetishizing MAGA figures who call on Trump to use "emergency powers" or "domestic war powers" (i.e. some form of martial law) to confront domestic terrorism.
They aren't out to destroy terrorists. They're out to destroy the rule of law.
So here's the pattern: Unleash the hate by rhetorically giving it oxygen. When it leads to violence, use that as an excuse to declare martial law against both immigrants and any form of dissent.
I hope to god that I'm overreacting. But Murphy is hardly the hair-raising type. To add to the alarm, Bret Bair recently said that he's been told to expect "shock and awe" on day one of Trump's presidency. As a reminder, here's what it looked like the last time a presidential administration used that phrase:
At the conservative publication "Washington Times," Don Feder proclaimed that "Trump’s victory marks the return of masculinity." I wondered what the heck he meant by that, so I read the piece. Apparently men like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff don't qualify as "masculine." Neither does Joe Biden.
For the past four years, we’ve been misled by an increasingly feeble old man who hid in the White House or on the beach in Delaware. On Jan. 20, there will be a man of the house again.
The closest Feder comes to a definition of masculinity is when he writes: "Men take responsibility, whether it’s by fighting crime, guarding our borders or meeting foreign threats." It would be interesting to ask him whether women are capable of taking responsibility for those things as well.
Amanda Marcotte captured the dilemma facing men like Feder by recognizing the larger paradox (emphasis mine).
They venerate masculinity, but cannot tell you what it is. Look closely at their manhood discourse and the contradictions are immediately apparent. They insist gender is "natural," fixed at birth, and beyond an individual's power to change. They also treat manhood as a fragile status, easily snatched away by the smallest of choices.According to Jesse Watters at Fox News, merely wishing another man "happy birthday" is enough to remove man status from a person. Manfluencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate declares one emasculated for admiring a woman's beauty. As I wrote about last week, MAGA hype man Josiah Moody claims it's "gay" to have sex with your wife for pleasure. Fox News' list of foods that strip your masculinity away is long, ranging from ice cream cones to soup....
MAGA masculinity is such a hazy and contradictory concept that it mostly gets defined by what it's not: not female, not queer, not allowed to eat ice cream or say "happy birthday."
So if Trump and his enablers are masculine, but Biden, Walz, and Elmhoff aren't, doesn't that raise the question of whether or not gender DOES actually exist on a continuum? Hmmmm...
Also, if you remember, these are the same people who went apoplectic if a liberal couldn't provide a short, succinct answer to the question, "What is a woman?" And yet, when it comes to masculinity, they define it primarily as the opposite of anything they consider to be feminine.
The truth is that boys and men are constantly being told to prove their masculinity - indicating that it is not, in fact, "natural" or "normal."
Riane Eisler - who is best known for her book The Chalice and the Blade - wrote that the underlying problem is not about gender at all.
The root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the blade is idealized - in which both men and women are taught to equate true masculinity with violence and dominance and to see men who do not conform to this ideal as too soft or effeminate.
The ethos of our patriarchy is this idea that dominance (often achieved via violence) is the only way to power. We're seeing this run amok these days in how MAGA describes our current political situation. In order for dominance to be effective, it must be rooted in fear and insecurity. People are seen as enemies to be defeated and subjugated. The blade is the weapon of choice.
And so the flames of fear and insecurity are fanned, while threats/hostages are made/taken in an attempt to subjugate the enemy. Any reaction other than to fight back on those terms is viewed as capitulation and derided as effeminate: "weak," "p*ssy," and not "manly enough."
Is it any wonder that, as our country struggles with this form of patriarchy as the status quo, those who are most fearful of going forward have rejected two supremely qualified women who ran for president against an old white man with heavy makeup who rambled on about a famous golfer's dick on the campaign trail? Even more ominously, is it any wonder that the president-elect is guilty of sexual assault and has nominated several other perpetrators to his cabinet?
When it comes to solutions, I am reminded that several years ago my friend Robinswing wrote a piece titled "We Can't Fix Ya."
The blackwoman has been thinking it might be time to seek out some solutions for eliminating racism. A more difficult project than I imagined.
Race is a problem for white people to solve. If black people or brown people could have made racism go away it would have long since disappeared back into the nothing-ness from which it came.
Nah, it’s on white folks to make the necessary moves to kill and bury, once and for all, the notion of race. I think in a generation or two this just might happen.
On that last sentence, my friend might have been a bit optimistic. But on the larger question, she was right. It's on white people to kill and bury racism. And after watching what happened to Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, I'd suggest that it's on men to kill and bury patriarchy once and for all.
I'd like to personally thank men like Tim Walz who have stepped up to the plate on that one!
To be honest, I'm in no mood to celebrate the new year. In addition to having to listen to MAGA nonsense over the next four years, my head is full of trepidation about a possible financial crisis, another badly-managed pandemic, and an escalating climate crisis.
But in her usual brilliant manner, Heather Cox Richardson reminded me of another impending disaster related to Trump's re-election - and this one (like the climate crisis) has horrific long-term consequences.
She started by noting Elon Musk's public support for Germany's neo-Nazi AfD Party. In response to an op-ed Musk wrote in a German newspaper, she quoted Jens Spahn - the State Secretary of the German Ministry of Finance.
The AfD wants to leave NATO, reactivate Nord Stream 2, and is anti-US, pro-Putin and pro-Russia. Is that what the USA wants? A Germany that turns towards Russia and away from the USA?
The AfD wants to leave the Eurozone, our by far largest trading partner. We conduct ~40% of our trade within Eurozone. Without the Euro and the EU, the German economy would completely collapse.
Heather went on to link all of that to Trump's threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
Trump is not threatening our rivals, but rather is threatening our own allies in the area around the U.S. And now Musk is supporting an anti-NATO, pro-Russia party in Germany. It could be that what we are seeing is an attempt to throw away NATO and America’s influence across the globe in order to carve up the world into spheres, with Trump offering to abandon Europe to Russia while the U.S., run by the DOGE faction of the Republican Party, officially takes control of a U.S.-centric sphere.
This is precisely where Putin's agenda is headed. To understand, it is important to know that his overarching ambition is to overturn the "rules-based order" that was established after World War II and return to the "great powers era." Gabriel Glickman described the two pillars of the "rules-based order."
After World War II, an elaborate financial network — from lending institutions like the IMF to a currency valuation system — was established to increase economic cooperation between countries. This was done to prevent the harmful economic competitiveness that caused the Great Depression and created the conditions for the rise of fascism...
As the postwar period transitioned to a competition between capitalist and communist nations, military conflict between powerful countries became more likely. NATO was established in 1949 as a form of collective security that could deter Soviet militarism. This was the second pillar of the international order, along with institutions like the United Nations that promoted diplomacy over war.
When Richardson writes about carving the world up into spheres, abandoning Europe to Russia while the U.S. takes control of our sphere, she's describing Putin's dream of a return to the "great powers era."
This is the conflict that is central to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. He is attempting to show Russia's dominance in his sphere - while the Biden administration and Europe have been defending the rules-based order that protects the sovereignty of national borders.
What Richardson is pointing out is that Trump's threats against our allies are tied to Putin's invasion of Ukraine in that they are all motivated by an attempt to overthrow the international order that has (so far) been successful in preventing World War III.
If you want to know one of the things that keeps me up at night...there it is.
So no, I don't feel like celebrating the beginning of 2025 where the only hope I have is that enough people wake up to the potential nightmare we're facing in order to afford us the possibility of stopping what's coming.
But for being such a downer, I'll end with my favorite New Year's Eve song by the marvelous Bette Midler.
