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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. On Wednesday, he attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, although he is not a Cabinet member. Meanwhile, Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been working behind the scenes to enact far-right policies aimed at privatizing public resources like Medicaid and Social Security. We speak with Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic to discuss the radical DOGE agenda. “As they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, … they also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich,” he says.
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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. On Wednesday, he attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, although he is not a Cabinet member. Meanwhile, Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been working behind the scenes to enact far-right policies aimed at privatizing public resources like Medicaid and Social Security. We speak with Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic to discuss the radical DOGE agenda. “As they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, … they also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich,” he says.
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Thousands gathered in Beirut Sunday to mourn the death of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Under a ceasefire agreement, Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon last week, but it continues to illegally occupy five locations in the country. Correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous traveled to Lebanon last week to report from the ground in southern Lebanon and to cover Nasrallah’s funeral, one of the biggest in the region in decades. The large turnout of thousands of Lebanese mourners was a “show of presence and of support for Hezbollah, which suffered heavy losses in Israel’s war on Lebanon,” Abdel Kouddous says.
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Thousands gathered in Beirut Sunday to mourn the death of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Under a ceasefire agreement, Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon last week, but it continues to illegally occupy five locations in the country. Correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous traveled to Lebanon last week to report from the ground in southern Lebanon and to cover Nasrallah’s funeral, one of the biggest in the region in decades. The large turnout of thousands of Lebanese mourners was a “show of presence and of support for Hezbollah, which suffered heavy losses in Israel’s war on Lebanon,” Abdel Kouddous says.
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An unvaccinated child has died of measles, Texas officials announced Wednesday, the first death from measles in the United States in a decade. The child’s death in a hospital in Lubbock, in West Texas, comes as the largest measles outbreak in the state in over 30 years is now spreading to New Mexico. Since last month, 124 people have contracted the disease, most of them unvaccinated children. “The minute you stop vaccinating and maintaining that vigilance of 90-95% vaccine coverage, measles comes roaring back, and that’s what’s happened here in West Texas,” world-renowned pediatrician, virologist and vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez, tells Democracy Now!
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An unvaccinated child has died of measles, Texas officials announced Wednesday, the first death from measles in the United States in a decade. The child’s death in a hospital in Lubbock, in West Texas, comes as the largest measles outbreak in the state in over 30 years is now spreading to New Mexico. Since last month, 124 people have contracted the disease, most of them unvaccinated children. “The minute you stop vaccinating and maintaining that vigilance of 90-95% vaccine coverage, measles comes roaring back, and that’s what’s happened here in West Texas,” world-renowned pediatrician, virologist and vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez, tells Democracy Now!
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Democracy Now! Thursday, February 27, 2025
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The rainy season had just passed when we made the difficult trek to eastern Myanmar last year to see how rebel troops were managing in the fourth year of war. We interviewed dozens of people over the course of three weeks – doctors and nurses from Yangon trying to adjust to life in the jungle and a group of young men and women working to build a kinder, friendlier police force with few resources.
We met smiling fighters who despite being low on ammunition were managing to hold off major advances by military forces, and civilians trying to bring a sense of normalcy to the makeshift camps they had to flee to.
We witnessed pain and suffering, as well as resilience, determination and uncertainty over what’s yet to come. As one person told us: “We cannot claim what will be tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. We just live, day-by-day.”
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jim Snyder, Gemunu Amarasinghe.
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The re-election of Donald Trump is proof that the Right’s most powerful weapon is media manipulation, ensuring the public sphere is not engaged in rational debate, reports the Independent Australia.
COMMENTARY: By Victoria Fielding
I once heard someone say that when the Left and the Right became polarised — when they divorced from each other — the Left got all the institutions of truth including science, education, justice and democratic government.
The Right got the institution of manipulation: the media. This statement hit me for six at the time because it seemed so clearly true.
What was also immediately clear is that there was an obvious reason why the Left sided with the institutions of truth and the Right resorted to manipulation. It is because truth does not suit right-wing arguments.
The existence of climate change does not suit fossil fuel billionaires. Evidence that wealth does not trickle down does not suit the capitalist class. The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion (yes, I put those words in that order on purpose) is better for everyone, rather than a discriminatory, hateful, destructive, divided unequal world is dangerous for the Right to admit.
The Right’s embrace of the media institution also makes sense when you consider that the institutions of truth are difficult to buy, whereas billionaires can easily own manipulative media.
Just ask Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into a political manipulation machine. Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who is currently engaged in a bitter family war to stop three of his children opposing him and his son Lachlan from using their “news” organisations as a form of political manipulation for right-wing interests.
Right-wingers also know that truthful institutions only have one way of communicating their truths to the public: via the media. Once the media environment is manipulated, we enter a post-truth world.
Experts derided as untrustworthy ‘elitists’
This is the world where billionaire fossil fuel interests undermine climate action. It is where scientists create vaccines to save lives but the manipulated public refuses to take them. Where experts are derided as untrustworthy “elitists”.
And it is where the whole idea of democratic government in the US has been overthrown to install an autocratic billionaire-enriching oligarchy led by an incompetent fool who calls himself the King.
Once you recognise this manipulated media environment, you also understand that there is not — and never has been — such as thing as a rational public debate. Those engaged in the institutions of the Left — in science, education, justice and democratic government — seem mostly unwilling to accept this fact.
Instead, they continue to believe if they just keep telling people the truth and communicating what they see as entirely rational arguments, the public will accept what they have to say.
I think part of the reason that the Left refuses to accept that public debate is not rational and rather, is a manipulated bin fire of misleading information, including mis/disinformation and propaganda, is because they are not equipped to compete in this reality. What do those on the Left do with “post-truth”?
They seem to just want to ignore it and hope it goes away.
A perfect example of this misunderstanding of the post-truth world and the manipulated media environment’s impact on the public is this paper, by political science professors at the Australian National University Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle.
Stunningly absolutist claim
Their research sought to understand why polling at the start of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum showed widespread public support for the Voice but over the course of the campaign, this support dropped to the point where the Voice was defeated with 60 per cent voting “No” and 40 per cent, “Yes”.
In presenting their study’s findings, the authors make the stunningly absolutist claim that:
‘…the public’s exposure to all forms of mass media – as we have measured it here – had no impact on the result’.
A note is then attached to this finding with the caveat:
‘As noted earlier, given the data at hand we are unable to test the possibility that the content of the media being consumed resulted in a reinforcement of existing beliefs and partisanship rather than a conversion.’
This caveat leaves a gaping hole in the finding by failing to account for how media reinforcing existing beliefs is an important media effect – as argued by Neil Gavin here. Since it was not measured, how can they possibly say there was no effect?
Furthermore, the very premise of the author’s sweeping statement that media exposure had no impact on the result of the Referendum is based on two naive assumptions:
Dual assumption of rationality
This dual assumption of rationality – one that the authors interestingly admit is an assumption – is evidenced in their hypothesis which states:
‘Voters who did not follow the campaign in the mass media were more likely to move from a yes to a no vote compared to voters who did follow the campaign in the mass media.’
This hypothesis, the authors explain, is premised on the assumption ‘that those with less information are more likely to opt for the status quo and cast a no vote’, and therefore that less exposure to media would change a vote from “Yes” to “No”.What this hypothesis assumes is that if a voter received more rational information in the media about the Referendum, that information would rationally drive their vote in the “Yes” direction. When their data disproved this hypothesis, the authors used this finding to claim that the media had no effect.
To understand the reality of what happened in the Referendum debate, the word “rational” needs to be taken out of the equation and the word “manipulated” put in.
We know, of course, that the Referendum was awash with manipulative information, which all supported the “No” campaign. For example, my study of News Corp’s Voice coverage — Australia’s largest and most influential news organisation — found that News Corp actively campaigned for the “No” proposition in concert with the “No” campaign, presenting content more like a political campaign than traditional journalism and commentary.
A study by Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analysed how the Voice Referendum was discussed on social media platform, X. Far from a rational debate, Graham identified that the “No” campaign and its supporters engaged in a participatory disinformation propaganda campaign, which became a “truth market” about the Voice.
The ‘truth market’
This “truth market” was described as drawing “Yes” campaigners into a debate about the truth of the Voice, sidetracking them from promoting their own cause.
What such studies showed was that, far from McAllister and Biddle’s assumed rational information environment, the Voice Referendum public debate was awash with manipulation, propaganda, disinformation and fear-mongering.
The “No” campaign that delivered this manipulation perfectly demonstrates how the Right uses media to undermine institutions of truth, to undermine facts and to undermine the rationality of democratic debates.
The completely unfounded assumption that the more information a voter received about the Voice, the more likely they would vote “Yes”, reveals a misunderstanding of the reality of a manipulated public debate environment present across all types of media, from mainstream news to social media.
It also wrongly treats voters like rational deliberative computers by assuming that the more information that goes in, the more they accept that information. This is far from the reality of how mediated communication affects the public.
The reason the influence of media on individuals and collectives is, in reality, so difficult to measure and should never be bluntly described as having total effect or no effect, is that people are not rational when they consume media, and every individual processes information in their own unique and unconscious ways.
One person can watch a manipulated piece of communication and accept it wholeheartedly, others can accept part of it and others reject it outright.
Manipulation unknown
No one piece of information determines how people vote and not every piece of information people consume does either. That’s the point of a manipulated media environment. People who are being manipulated do not know they are being manipulated.
Importantly, when you ask individuals how their media consumption impacted on them, they of course do not know. The decisions people make based on the information they have ephemerally consumed — whether from the media, conversations, or a wide range of other information sources, are incredibly complex and irrational.
Surely the re-election of Donald Trump for a second time, despite all the rational arguments against him, is proof that the manipulated media environment is an incredibly powerful weapon — a weapon the Right, globally, is clearly proficient at wielding.
It is time those on the Left caught up and at least understood the reality they are working in.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. This article was first published by the Independent Australia and is republished with the author’s permission.
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Prime Minister Mark Brown has survived a motion in the Cook Islands Parliament aimed at ousting his government, the second Pacific Island leader to face a no-confidence vote this week.
In a vote yesterday afternoon (Tuesday, Cook Islands time), the man who has been at the centre of controversy in the past few weeks, defeated the motion by 13 votes to 9. Two government ministers were absent for the vote.
The motion was put forward by the opposition MP Teariki Heather, the leader of the Cook Islands United Party.
Ahead of the vote, Heather acknowledged that Brown had majority support in Parliament.
However, he said he was moving the motion on principle after recent decisions by Brown, including a proposal to create a Cook Islands passport and shunning New Zealand from deals it made with China, which has divided Cook Islanders.
“These are the merits that I am presenting before this House. We have the support of our people and those living outside the country, and so it is my challenge. Where do you stand in this House?” Heather said.
Brown said his country has been so successful in its development in recent years that it graduated to first world status in 2020.
‘Engage on equal footing’
“We need to stand on our own two feet, and we need to engage with our partners on an equal footing,” he said.
“Economic and financial independence must come first before political independence, and that was what I discussed and made clear when I met with the New Zealand prime minister and deputy prime minister in Wellington in November.”
Brown said the issues Cook Islanders faced today were not just about passports and agreements but about Cook Islands expressing its self-determination.
“This is not about consultation. This is about control.”
“We cannot compete with New Zealand. When their one-sided messaging is so compelling that even our opposition members will be swayed.
“We never once talked to the New Zealand government about cutting our ties with New Zealand but the message our people received was that we were cutting our ties with New Zealand.
“We have been discussing the comprehensive partnership with New Zealand for months. But the messaging that got out is that we have not consulted.
Cook Islands PM accuses NZ media, experts of thinking ‘we are too dumb’ https://t.co/ADrWN4Yjp9
— RNZ Pacific (@RNZPacific) February 25, 2025
‘We are not a child’
“We are a partner in the relationship with New Zealand. We are not a child.”
He said the motion of no confidence had been built on misinformation to the extent that the mover of the motion has stated publicly that he was moving this motion in support of New Zealand.
“The influence of New Zealand in this motion of no confidence should be of concern to all Cook Islands who value . . . who value our country.
“My job is not to fly the New Zealand flag. My job is to fly my own country’s flag.”
Last week, hundreds of Cook Islanders opposing Brown’s political decisions rallied in Avarua, demanding that he step down for damaging the relationship between Aotearoa and Cook Islands.
The Cook Islands is a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand. It is part of the Realm of New Zealand, sharing the same Head of State.
This year, the island marks its 60th year of self-governance.
According to Cook Islands 2021 Census, its population is less than 15,000.
New Zealand remains the largest home to the Cook Islands community, with over 80,000 Cook Islands Māori, while about 28,000 live in Australia.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous. “The people who are living in a dangerous environment are the incarcerated men and women,” says Saldaña, who notes the strike began the same week murder charges were announced against six of the guards who brutally beat to death handcuffed prisoner Robert Brooks in an attack captured on body-camera video. “The whole world saw it, and they’re questioning: How long has this been going on in the prison system? This illegal strike is to erase that consciousness that’s building,” says Saldaña. We are also joined by anthropologist Orisanmi Burton, who studies prisons and says the proliferation of solitary confinement and other harsh measures is directly linked to political organizing behind bars starting in the late 1960s. “Prisons in the United States are best understood as institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control,” says Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.
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We look at a rare victory for a death row prisoner before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Tuesday, three conservative justices joined with the three liberals to overturn the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip, who has spent nearly 30 years on Oklahoma death row and had exhausted all other appeals to stay his execution. The justices said Glossip was entitled to a new trial after errors in his original prosecution. Glossip’s conviction stems from the 1997 murder of his former boss, who was killed by another man who accused Glossip of masterminding the killing. Glossip has always maintained his innocence, and even Oklahoma Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond has said Glossip did not get a fair trial. We speak with Glossip’s spiritual adviser, Sister Helen Prejean, renowned anti-death penalty activist, who says the case has brought together a remarkable coalition to fight for justice and helped to highlight the problems with capital punishment. “We don’t need this thing,” says Prejean. “It’s time to shut it down.”
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We speak with the acclaimed science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, who has spent decades writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives. He coined the term “enshittification” to describe how online platforms degrade the user experience over time in search of profits, though it has been widely adopted to describe a larger sense of decline and decay across society. He discusses his new book Picks and Shovels, Silicon Valley’s big bet on artificial intelligence to discipline its workers, and billionaire Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. “The point of this chaotic blitz is to demoralize their opponents,” Doctorow says of Musk’s work through DOGE, which has gutted government agencies and wide swaths of the federal workforce. “In the reality-based world, even if you are worried about government waste, even if you want to make government smaller, you have to acknowledge the empirical fact that payroll accounts for 4% of the federal budget.”
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Democracy Now! Wednesday, February 26, 2025
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Asia Pacific Report
An independent Jewish body has condemned the move by Australia’s 39 universities to endorse a “dangerous and politicised” definition of antisemitism which threatens academic freedom.
The Jewish Council of Australia, a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers, said in a statement that the move would have a “chilling effect” on legitimate criticism of Israel, and risked institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.
The council also criticised the fact that the universities had done so “without meaningful consultation” with Palestinian groups or diverse Jewish groups which were critical of Israel.
The definition was developed by the Group of Eight (Go8) universities and adopted by Universities Australia.
“By categorising Palestinian political expression as inherently antisemitic, it will be unworkable and unenforceable, and stifle critical political debate, which is at the heart of any democratic society,” the Jewish Council of Australia said.
“The definition dangerously conflates Jewish identities with support for the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.”
The council statement said that it highlighted two key concerns:
Mischaracterisation of criticism of Israel
The definition states: “Criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel or all Jews or when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions.”
The definition’s inclusion of “calls for the elimination of the State of Israel” would mean, for instance, that calls for a single binational democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis had equal rights, could be labelled antisemitic.
Moreover, the wording around “harmful tropes” was dangerously vague, failing to distinguish between tropes about Jewish people, which were antisemitic, and criticism of the state of Israel, which was not, the statement said.
Misrepresentation of Zionism as core to Jewish identity
The definition states that for most Jewish people “Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.
The council said it was deeply concerned that by adopting this definition, universities would be taking and promoting a view that a national political ideology was a core part of Judaism.
“This is not only inaccurate, but is also dangerous,” said the statement.
“Zionism is a political ideology of Jewish nationalism, not an intrinsic part of Jewish identity.
“There is a long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the beginning of its emergence in the late-19th century, to the present day. Many, if not the majority, of people who hold Zionist views today are not Jewish.”
In contrast to Zionism and the state of Israel, said the council, Jewish identities traced back more than 3000 years and spanned different cultures and traditions.
Jewish identities were a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel were not, the council said.
Growing numbers of dissenting Jews
“While many Jewish people identify as Zionist, many do not. There are a growing number of Jewish people worldwide, including in Australia, who disagree with the actions of the state of Israel and do not support Zionism.
“Australian polling in this area is not definitive, but some polls suggest that 30 percent of Australian Jews do not identify as Zionists.
“A recent Canadian poll found half of Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionist. In the United States, more and more Jewish people are turning away from Zionist beliefs and support for the state of Israel.”
Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer and the Jewish Council of Australia’s executive officer, said: “It degrades the very real fight against antisemitism for it to be weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the Israeli state and Palestinian political expressions.
“It also risks fomenting division between communities and institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.”
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From the unflinching investigative team behind Reveal comes a new weekly podcast that delivers More To The Story. Every Wednesday, Peabody Award-winning journalist Al Letson sits down with the people at the heart of our changing world for candid—sometimes uncomfortable—conversations that make you rethink your entire newsfeed. Whether he’s sounding the alarm about the future of democracy, grappling with the shifting dynamics of political power, or debating big cultural moments, Al always brings his unfiltered curiosity to topics and perspectives that go too often ignored. Because, as Al reminds us every week on Reveal, when you take the time to listen, there’s always More To The Story. Find it in your Reveal feed beginning March 5, 2025.
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Nothing, but nothing, is worse than those Jews who level totally unfounded allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the State of Israel. They are repulsive and revolting human beings. Their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis – the role models for Hamas – will…
— Mark Leibler (@LeiblerMark) February 8, 2025
COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein
As someone Jewish, the son of Holocaust survivors and members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, it is hard to know whether to characterise Mark Leibler’s tweet as offensive, appalling, contemptuous, insulting or a disgusting, shameful and grievous introduction of the Holocaust, and those who were murdered by the Nazis, into his tweet — or all of the foregoing!
Leibler’s tweet is most likely a breach of recently passed legislation in Australia, both federally and in various state Parliaments, making hateful words and actions, and doxxing, criminal offences. It will be “interesting” to see how the police deal with the complaint taken up with the police alleging Leibler’s breach of the legislation.
In the end, Leibler’s attempted intimidation of those who might have been thinking of going to the rally failed — miserably!
There are many Jews who abhor what Israel is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) but feel intimidated by the Leiblers of this world who accuse them of being antisemitic for speaking out against Israel’s actions and not those rusted-on 100 percent supporters of Israel who blindly and uncritically support whatever Israel does, however egregious.
Leibler, and others like him, who label Jews as antisemites because they dare speak out about Israel’s actions, certainly need to be called out.
As a lawyer, Leibler knows that actions have consequences. A group of concerned Jews (this writer included) are in the process of lodging a complaint about Leibler’s tweet with the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission.
Separately from that, this week will see full-page adverts in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — signed by hundreds of Jews — bearing the heading:
“Australia must reject Trump’s call for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish Australians say NO to ethnic cleansing.”
Jeffrey Loewenstein, LLB, was a member of the Victorian Bar and a one-time chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission and member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations public policy journal and is republished here with permission.
This full-page ad appears in today’s @smh and @theage with the names of 500 Jews, many more signed but couldn’t fit onto the page!, to clearly say that they’re utterly opposed to removing Palestinians from Gaza. Notice the silence from most “mainstream” Jewish groups? It’s… pic.twitter.com/GuUqvVMWNZ
— Antony Loewenstein (@antloewenstein) February 24, 2025
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