“We do come under intense scrutiny and often are accused of having a bias in favor of one side or another,” says New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ( 12/2/25)—which in his mind seems to prove they’re doing a fine job.
Last week, a sentence stopped me in my tracks. It was embedded in a question posed by Patrick Healy, New York Times assistant managing editor, to his boss, executive editor Joe Kahn.
The duo’s back-and-forth (New York Times, 12/2/25)—in which Healy synthesized readers’ questions, and also asked Kahn a few of his own—offered readers a look at how the Times covers the issues of the day.
Halfway through a meandering question on Gaza, Healy said: “Some critics say we’re mouthpieces for Hamas.” Wait, what?
Only a handful of zealots fit this bill, and maybe the most conspicuous example—the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)—has a familial tie to Kahn.
Was Healy gaslighting readers? I wondered. Or was he about to disclose Kahn’s tie to readers? (Spoiler: he didn’t; nor did Kahn.)
‘Dissected newspaper coverage’
CAMERA billboard likening the New York Times to Hamas.
CAMERA is a group dedicated to attacking news outlets critical of Israel. Its research methods have been criticized as slipshod and agenda-driven (Extra!, 3–4/01; Electronic Intifada, 8/24/09). “CAMERA’s story is an un-nuanced, hard-line version of Mideast history in which Israel can do no wrong,” the American Prospect (5/1/08) observed, writing about the group’s efforts to surreptitiously edit Wikipedia articles on Israel/Palestine.
The Forward (11/29/19) has included it among groups “known for intimidation and smear campaigns against scholars and students whose views they oppose.” It has backed efforts to plant informants in college classrooms to monitor for “bias” (Electronic Intifada, 4/29/10).
And for over a decade, it has plastered a billboard across the street from the Times’ office, which it uses to attack the Times, even going so far as to compare the paper to Hamas: “Hamas attacks Israel: Not surprising. The New York Times attacks Israel: Also not surprising.”
Far from recoiling at CAMERA’s extremism, Kahn’s late father, Leo Kahn, embraced the group, serving on its board for nearly two decades. As the billionaire co-founder of the office supplies company Staples, Leo Kahn was also presumably a donor to CAMERA, helping underwrite the group’s attacks, including on his own son’s employer.
Meanwhile, father and son “often dissected newspaper coverage,” the Times (4/19/22) noted in a profile of Joe Kahn, upon his being named executive editor in 2022.
‘Engagement and mastery’
“It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7,” the New York Times decreed (Intercept, 4/15/24), but the paper “set a high bar for allowing others to use [‘genocide’] as an accusation.”
Leo Kahn died in 2011, well before his son was elevated to the Times’ top job, but it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be proud of Joe’s handiwork.
Under Joe, the Times has ignored the conclusions of UN agencies, human rights groups and others by refusing to call Israel’s two-year-plus destruction of Gaza a genocide.
Other terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “Palestine” are also discouraged in Kahn’s newsroom, according to an internal Times memo leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24).
Meanwhile, even as Kahn was clamping down on the newsroom, he offered praise to then-President Joe Biden for backing Israel’s genocide.
Biden has shown “a degree of engagement and mastery over some of the details of foreign policy,” Kahn said in May 2024, citing as an example Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide, then in its seventh month.
‘Some sort of genetic reason’
Joe Kahn told Semafor (5/5/24) that raising the issue of his father’s involvement with CAMERA was “a backhanded way of saying, ‘His father was Jewish.’”
When Semafor (5/5/24) (gently) asked Joe Kahn whether his father’s views on Israel may have influenced his own, he cried antisemitism:
[To] raise doubts implicitly about the integrity of somebody, based on their parent—the implication there would be that there’s some sort of genetic reason why I would be partial to Israel. So yeah, I think there is some implication of race.
“My father did what he did,” Kahn continued. “By the time that I was in journalism, he wasn’t active at all.”
But Kahn’s journalism career began in 1987, three years before his father joined CAMERA’s board.
By the time Kahn joined the Times in 1998, his dad had already served on CAMERA’s board for eight years. And Leo Kahn would remain there for another decade, even as his son climbed the Times’ ladder.
“As late as 2008, the year Joe Kahn was promoted to editor on the [Times] foreign desk, Leo Kahn was listed on CAMERA’s board of directors,” the Intercept (1/28/24) reported.
Keeping the world at bay
FAIR’s Owen Schacht (10/7/24): “The Times’ prized cover story was built on shaky foundations, with the paper dismissing assurances from hospitals and hotlines that they had gotten no reports of sexual violence, relying instead on politicized sources with a record of debunked atrocity claims.”
Maybe most egregiously, under Kahn, the Times front-paged dubious Israeli claims about the October 7 attack, specifically that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war (Intercept, 1/28/24; FAIR.org, 10/7/24).
The Times story (12/28/23) was published two and a half months after October 7, at a pivotal moment when Israel’s war on Gaza might have been brought to an early end, with global opinion rapidly turning against Israel over its brutal response. But the Times’ front-page story helped keep the world at bay, buying Israel time to continue its genocide.
Two years later, the Times has updated, but not retracted its story—which Kahn hailed.
At some point, the Times will have to offer a mea culpa for its complicity in Israel’s genocide (as it did with the Iraq War—5/26/04). Until then, readers will have to make do with being gaslit.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Alex Main about the Honduran election for the December 5, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The BBC’sDecember 3 headline drops us right in: “As Lead Changes in Knife-Edge Honduran Election, Will Trump Fail to Get His Way?” What’s going on in the Honduran general elections, and what does it have to do with Trump? And, also, what do we lose when media report other country’s elections through the lens of US power?
Here to help us make sense of things is Alex Main. He’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alex Main.
Alex Main: Thank you. Good to be back.
JJ: We are recording the morning of December 4. Folks will be hearing it later, and I trust they’ll understand that we are talking about what we know now, and whatever the outcome, the same factors are still in play.
So we can’t do it total justice, but if you could just set the stage a little, these elections in Honduras—yes, for president, but they’re much broader than that—have been very fraught. Why is that? What is at stake here, and what makes it so hard to read, especially from outside Honduras?
AM: Yes, Honduras has had a fraught history, really, and a lot of it has to do with the US, and its role in Honduras, which is often referred to, or has been referred to in the past, as the quintessential “banana republic,” where basically US corporations and the US military have essentially had their way for well over a century now.
It started with bananas and the United Fruit Company, and today, I think, Honduras is seen as a very geostrategic location for the US. They have their most important military base, with Task Force Bravo, in Soto Cano, which is not far from the capital city of Honduras, Tegucigalpa. And that base has been active since the 1980s, when it was a launchpad for the US and its interventions in Central America, and primarily in Nicaragua, where of course it was supporting the Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas, who came to power in 1979.
And beyond just Soto Cano the base, there were lots of airfields in remote parts of Honduras where the CIA flew weapons and munitions to Contra forces in Nicaragua throughout the war there in the 1980s. And that was done with the complete acquiescence of the Honduran government. And I think Honduras, perhaps more than any other country in that region, had historically been the most pliant government towards the US, really allowing the US to use it very freely to intervene throughout the region.
JJ: Someone reminded me that people used to call it USS Honduras, so much was it seen as a staging ground for US actions in the region.
AM: Yes, that’s right. And that may seem anachronistic, and sort of a relic of the Cold War, but we’re currently seeing a remilitarization of the region under this Trump administration. I mean, it was already heavily militarized, but now it’s reaching really new levels, with close to 20% of US naval forces now concentrated in the Caribbean, these threats of war against Venezuela; and the US has been very aggressively seeking the support and the infrastructure of countries in the region to, again, serve as a launch pad to intervene militarily, currently, potentially, in Venezuela, but also other countries: That could include Colombia, that could include Mexico. It really depends on the whims of the current president of the United States, but all is a part of this new war on “narco terror.”
So I would say Honduras remains perhaps more geostrategic than ever, in the eyes of the folks in charge now in Washington, DC. And that has had a huge influence on what happens in the country, because the US has just an enormous amount of economic influence there. Honduras is heavily dependent, not just on trade with the US, but also on remittances from Hondurans that are in the US. They’re a big part of the annual GDP of the country.
And so every little thing that the US does and says regarding Honduras really has huge effects in the country, effects that are very rarely noted here in the US in the media and so on. But in these elections, they have gotten some notice.
JJ: I’ve seen some attention. I mean, I’m looking at this BBC piece, but not because it’s special, more because it’s not special, and it states straight out, “Many in Honduras see the US president’s fingerprints all over this election.” So what are they talking about there?
AM: Yeah, absolutely. And at this point, we don’t know who the winner of the election is, today, on December 4. But we do know who has not won the election, and that is Rixi Moncada, from the left-wing LIBRE Party that rules the country under President Xiomara Castro, currently. She is in a distant third place, and it’s currently a toss up between [Nasry] Asfura from the National Party and Salvador Nasralla from the Liberal Party, and the National Party and the Liberal Party are the two parties that shared power in Honduras for decades following the end of the military dictatorship in Honduras in the mid-1980s.
So we’re seeing a return to the past, in a sense, with these two parties that are really very closely aligned. They’re both quite conservative, they’re very close to the US, and have always deferred to the US in terms of its foreign policy agenda, in the region and in the world. And of course that’s how US administrations, whether this one or previous ones, have always liked it in Honduras. That, to them, represents stability—not stability for Honduras, necessarily, but stability for US interests in that country and in the region.
So what we’ve seen that’s very striking is just a level of interference that I don’t think we’ve ever seen in a Honduran election before, where President Trump, just days before the election took place, this last Sunday, November 30, he publicly endorsed the National Party candidate, Asfura, and he announced as well that he was going to be pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former National Party president of Honduras, who served, illegally, two terms as president of the country, from I think 2014 to 2022, and who was heavily involved in corruption and in drug trafficking, and ended up extradited to the US and sentenced to over 40 years in jail.
JJ: Can we just put a pin in the drug trafficking? Just put a pin there in the “convicted of drug trafficking,” which is, I mean, irony is dead, but please, continue.
AM: Yes, absolutely. So that was, again, the most heavy interference that we’ve seen from a US president in an election in Honduras, perhaps in Latin America, at least publicly. There’s always, of course, a lot going on behind the scenes, and that, I’m sure, has certainly been the case in these elections.
But this is overtly, through Truth Social posts, backing this candidate, accusing both of the other candidates of being Communists, one supposedly openly a Communist, which I guess is maybe the most bad word in Trump’s political lexicon, but accusing Rixi Moncada of the LIBRE Party of being a Communist, and then also accusing Nasralla of being a Communist in disguise, who was there to thwart the chances of the National Party candidate.
Anyway, absurd claims, but in any case, any sort of statement like this was bound to have huge repercussions in Honduras. I think it’s a country that’s still recovering from a coup that took place back in 2009, a coup that the US helped enable during the Obama administration.
JJ: And I wanted to actually do a little revisit to that, because when I say “USS Honduras,” when you say “banana republic,” people may think, “that’s before I was born,” but, first of all, it’s not. And then, also, we have very recent, salient history. And I really just would like to take the moment to go back to that 2009 coup against Mel Zelaya, because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a role, but she scrubbed that role from her memoir, “Hard Choices” (give me a break). When that memoir came out in paperback, Hillary Clinton chose to erase her role in the 2009 coup in Honduras. And I think that’s fascinating. If you’re proud of it, why erase it?
AM: Yes. Well, it was a very revealing chapter that was taken out of the paperback edition, one where she proudly explained her role in preventing the elected president of Honduras—who hadn’t finished his term and had been ousted in a coup and forced into exile—from getting back into office. And by doing that, essentially it allowed this coup against Mel Zelaya, the elected president, to succeed.
And the election that took place, that was supported by the US and virtually no other country in the hemisphere, was carried out in extremely unfair conditions, extreme repression that was going on following the coup, extreme censorship and exclusion of candidates. And, of course, in a situation where there was a de facto government: There wasn’t a democracy, the democracy had not been restored, even though that’s what all the other countries in the region were calling for.
But the US essentially prevented that from happening, because they didn’t want someone like Mel Zelaya, who was from one of the two traditional political parties, from the Liberal Party, but who had essentially gone rogue and aligned himself with left-wing social movements in the country, demanding some very deep reforms, particularly to the constitution, which had been written during the military dictatorship of Honduras, and is very conservative and had a lot of constraints, and helped maintain a kind of neoliberal system in place.
So he represented a real threat to the perceived interests of the US. His social movement base was very much opposed to a continued US military presence in the country. And I think that’s still, today, a very thick red line for a lot of US policymakers, certainly those that have directed US policy towards Latin America from the State Department, Department of Defense and so on, for decades.
JJ: I’m going to ask you to come back to social movements in Honduras in just a second, but I did want to, first of all, read Hillary Clinton’s own words. She’s talking about conversations with Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa after the 2009 coup:
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.
And then I want to pin it to the quote from current US Rep. Maria Salazar from Florida, who’s describing that same 2009 military coup: “Then the Honduran democracy stood strong, thank God for that. And the armed forces abided by their duty to uphold democracy, and Mr. Zelaya was out of office.”
And I read those quotes just to alert us to the use of language, to the weaponization of the terms “democracy” and “free and fair”—because we know what happened. And then this is how it is described. And this includes news media, as late as, let me get my note here, 2017, the New York Timesis saying:
In 2009, after the Honduran military removed the leftist President Manuel Zelaya from power in a midnight coup, the United States joined other countries in trying to broker, albeit unsuccessfully, a deal for his return.
It’s just false. In other words, if the US is so proud of their involvement in Honduras and the region, why lie about it?
AM: That’s right.
JJ: Why scrub it?
AM: Well, Hilary Clinton didn’t lie about it in the first edition of her book, but then realized that it became a little bit awkward, and contradicted the official narrative.
And if I may, I’d also like to point your listeners to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Remember the big batches of emails that were released in 2015? Now they contained even more evidence of her very active role in preventing Mel Zelaya from returning to office. I wrote an article about this that you can find on our website at CEPR.net called “Hillary Clinton’s Emails and the Honduras Coup.” So we don’t need to go into the details now, but there’s a lot more that she did behind the scenes, and we discovered a lot more in those emails. But that got very little attention from the New York Times and other major outlets
JJ: And certainly isn’t part of her persona now, as she reinvents herself.
Well, I said I’d bring you back to social movements, because, as your colleague Mark Weisbrot wrote recently, a number of things were unleashed in the wake of that coup. And you’ve talked about the decline in human rights, and increase in femicide in particular, and just a number of drastic, difficult things that happened.
And then other things also happened, which were a growth in Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous movements. CounterSpin listeners will know about Berta Caceres. That coup unleashed bottom-up work and social justice work as well, and that, we should acknowledge, continues.
AM: No, absolutely. And I think it’ll be continuing more than ever. If there is a silver lining to this election—which, again, I think was shaped a lot by US interference—I think it’s that this gives LIBRE and the social movements a time, and a moment, to reassess and rebuild themselves.
In the process of coming to power, LIBRE entered a power structure that, in a certain sense, absorbed it. It went in a direction that I think a lot of the social movements [weren’t] as happy with. Even though, for the most part, I think key movements like OFRANEH and COPINH that represent Afro-Indigenous communities in Honduras, they absolutely called on Hondurans to vote against the bipartidismo, the bipartisan Liberal and National party alliance, but they weren’t very enthusiastically supportive of LIBRE. And I think there is an opportunity now for the LIBRE Party to refind its roots, that were very much based in social movement resistance, and perhaps get more direction from that going forward.
Alex Main: “If you are a right-wing Latin American government that’s aligned with the US, you get a free pass in the media.”
But at the same time, under another either National Party or Liberal Party government—at this stage, we don’t know which it will be—there’s likely to again be a lot of repression of the social movements. And so that’s something that’s very important to monitor, because it won’t get much attention. It didn’t get much attention after the coup. It didn’t get much attention at all during the two terms of Juan Orlando Hernandez—again, illegal terms, because the Constitution actually prevented him from being reelected.
But also because, in 2017, there are pretty clear indications that there was fraud during those elections carried out by the National Party. And there were huge protests in response to that fraud. And those protests were very violently repressed. You had over 30 protesters that were killed. The military was unleashed against the protesters, and that government has a terrible human rights record, but also a record of very endemic corruption throughout the institutions.
There were huge protests against the corruption as well that didn’t get much notice. And it’s almost as if, if you are a right-wing Latin American government that’s aligned with the US, you get a free pass in the media. Doesn’t get much notice if there’s a corruption scandal, if there’s repression. And, of course, in the case of Juan Orlando Hernandez, there were a lot of signs of his deep involvement in drug trafficking for many years. And it was only after he left the presidency that the US actively pursued him for his involvement in drug trafficking.
And now, really, he should be brought to justice in Honduras for his crimes there. But that seems unlikely to happen, with either the Liberal Party or the National Party in power. They look out for each other, and there’s a long record of corruption in both those parties, and a long record of impunity for the corruption that’s taken place. And, unfortunately, that’s likely to continue.
JJ: And no reason to look for, certainly, corporate US news media to cover that critically, or to platform the voices of the social movements that will be working to challenge it.
AM: That’s right.
JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Alex Main. He’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can follow their work online at CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Alex Main, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: If you see no problem in news outlets reporting on desperately horrific conditions in Gaza, and what various political entities are doing or could do to address them, while a ticker at the bottom of the screen offers you an opportunity to gamble—for money—on whether or not “famine” in the region will be officially declared, this episode is not for you.
We’re learning about the deal just struck by “news” outlets CNN and CNBC with the “prediction market operator” (evidently what we’re calling them now) Kalshi Inc. We’ll hear from Judd Legum—founder and author at the newsletter Popular Information—and from author and analyst Adam Johnson, of Substack‘s the Column and the podcast Citations Needed.
Judd Legum’s interview:
Adam Johnson’s interview:
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Drop Site (12/1/25): “The deadly assault last week near the White House was like a scene drawn from the world that the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, once inhabited in Afghanistan and which was shaped by the U.S.-led War on Terror during the last two decades.
Opinion writing about last month’s National Guard shooting in Washington, DC, serves as the latest example of US corporate media’s role in whitewashing US foreign policy.
The post-9/11 wars directly caused nearly a million deaths and dealt significant “blowback”—unintended repercussions experienced by the US as a result of its foreign policy—including rising extremist crimes by those with military backgrounds, according to a 2024 University of Maryland study.
On November 26, two members of the West Virginia National Guard—who were part of Trump’s National Guard deployment to DC—were shot without provocation, and one of the soldiers died from her injuries.
Law enforcement quickly named the shooting suspect as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a former member of a CIA-backed Afghan force called “Zero Units.” These units reportedly killed civilians (ProPublica, 12/15/22, 1/5/23) and committed war crimes (Intercept, 12/18/20).
While Lakanwal is not accused of committing crimes abroad, and his motives for the alleged shooting remain unclear, he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused,” a childhood friend told the New York Times (11/27/25).
Lakanwal was briefly imprisoned in Afghanistan, alongside other members of his Zero Unit team, after team members killed Afghan police members in a dispute over Taliban prisoners, Drop Site News (12/1/25) reported. Lakanwal had “long shown signs of significant psychological instability and drug use, even before he left Afghanistan,” Drop Site also detailed, citing multiple sources from the US and from his home province of Khost, Afghanistan.
While NPR‘s headline (12/1/25) described the suspect as having a “personal crisis,” the story quotes a resettlement volunteer saying he believed Lakanwal was “suffering from both PTSD and from his work with the US military in Afghanistan.”
He was “left deeply troubled by the death of a close friend and fellow Afghan commander in 2024,” who unsuccessfully sought asylum in the US, CBS News (12/1/25) wrote, citing a former Afghan commando. In June, Lakanwal sought help from a CIA program meant to help Zero Unit veterans with immigration issues, but his last post wasn’t answered and was deleted by the chat’s administrator, according to Rolling Stone (12/1/25).
Although there were other, more individual factors that seemed to affect Lakanwal—an NPR headline (12/1/25) described him as undergoing a “personal crisis”—even the personal in such cases may be political. A refugee resettlement volunteer quoted by NPR wrote before the attack that Lakanwal was “suffering from both PTSD and from his work with the US military in Afghanistan.” When mental and emotional damage from combat experience is turned outward, that’s a classic example of blowback.
‘Realities of blowback’
Spencer Ackerman (Zeteo, 11/28/25): “Much of the CIA’s Afghan workforce remains shrouded in official secrecy. But what is known about them is their wanton brutality, licensed and materially supported by the United States…. There is bound to be immense psychological damage when making someone, particularly a teenager, into a member of a death squad.”
Spencer Ackerman, national security journalist and author of the Forever Wars newsletter, penned an incisive editorial for independent news website Zeteo (11/28/25) on the blowback theory:
Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback—the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy—are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.
By contrast, six out of the eight US corporate media editorials and op-eds that covered the shooting ignored the extensive news reporting that suggests Lakanwal’s US military experience had a negative impact on his mental state, diverting attention to other aspects of the story, like the role of Trump’s National Guard deployment, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, or Lakanwal’s immigration status.
These opinions did little to challenge the stance of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has claimed (Newsweek, 11/30/25) that Lakanwal was likely “radicalized” after entering the US, and blamed—somewhat inconsistently—his entry on Biden’s vetting process. (If Lakanwal only developed radical views after he came to the US, how would vetting have caught them?)
One op-ed didn’t mention Lakanwal’s military experience at all (New York Post, 11/28/25). Three of the pieces briefly referenced his CIA ties—either treating them as a positive thing (“he had cooperated with the CIA in his home country and had been vetted by the American intelligence community”—Washington Post, 11/27/25; “the CIA said the man had been part of a CIA-backed Afghan ‘partner force’ in Kandahar province, one of the most dangerous places during the war”—Wall Street Journal, 11/28/25) or more neutrally (New York Post, 11/29/25). Another noted that he “served alongside US troops in Afghanistan” (New York Post, 11/27/25). But none of those made the connection between Lakanwal’s military background and his reported mental health struggles.
The New York Times editorial board (11/27/25), for its part, wrote that “he was described by a friend as a young man troubled by mental illness, as is so often the case in similar crimes,” and added in the same paragraph that “he reportedly had worked alongside the American intelligence services in his country,” without connecting the two—despite its paper’s own reporting (11/27/25) confirming Lakanwal’s mental health struggles related to his military experience.
Diverting attention
The New York Times editorial board (11/27/25) repeated the handwashing cliché: “No one, including the president, is responsible for this tragedy, except for its perpetrator.”
The New YorkTimes and Washington Post tried to relieve Trump of any blame for the shooting. The Times (11/27/25) opined that “no one, including the president, is responsible for this tragedy, except for its perpetrator”:
It should be possible to understand both that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard has been outrageous and that the use did not cause this shooting.
The Washington Post editorial board (11/27/25)—which has grown more right-wing since Trump’s inauguration—took it a step further when it wrote that “blaming the [National Guard’s] presence for provoking this monstrous act is inappropriate.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/28/25), meanwhile, attributed blame to Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan:
When and how the shooter was approved for entry will become clearer, and no doubt an orderly withdrawal would have allowed more careful investigation. This is one more cost of the Biden administration’s Afghan failure.
The negative framing of Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal is hardly a surprise for the Journal’s editorial board, which has a history of hammering that point home (e.g., 8/15/21, 8/19/21, 4/26/23, 9/9/24). But there is no evidence that an “orderly withdrawal” from Afghanistan would have allowed a “more careful investigation” of Lakanwal’s background.
After all, Lakanwal was vetted before he worked with the CIA in Afghanistan, and he—like all of the tens of thousands of Afghans resettled in the US through the Biden-era Operation Allies Welcome program—“underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States,” involving the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center, the Washington Post (11/28/25) reported.
That reporting contradicts the paper’s own editorial board (11/27/25), which claimed a day earlier that “it’s been obvious for years that vetting was insufficiently thorough.” “The Biden team’s failure to prepare for the fall of Kabul inevitably brought some dangerous people into the country,” the editorial said, who “should be identified and repatriated.”
Professional Islamophobe Douglas Murray (New York Post, 11/27/25) argued that the DC shooting showed Trump was right to call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
While the WashingtonPost, Wall Street Journal and New YorkTimes acknowledged that not every Afghan refugee should be punished for the shooting, the right-wing New York Post editorial board (11/29/25) argued that the incident necessitated a “top-to-bottom overhaul of immigration law.”
The New York Post published two more guest essays that expanded upon that argument. Far-right British-American journalist Douglas Murray argued in the Post (11/27/25) that “you cannot just leave borders open, or allow in large numbers of people with totally different value systems from your own.”
Mediaite editor Isaac Schorr (New York Post, 11/28/25) added that implementing “a rigorous, multi-layered ideological testing process to determine their suitability for life in America” should include a “one-half-strike-and-you’re-out process to prove they want to be ‘American’ in the truest sense of the word.”
‘Assimilation-focused immigration’
Bob Elston (USA Today, 12/4/25): “Many Afghans fought side by side with US servicemembers. Some were given a pathway to this country, and the vast majority of them now reside here peacefully.”
USA Today was the lone US corporate media outlet to acknowledge in its opinion section that Lakanwal’s military experience had a negative impact on his mental state. Bob Elston, a grant writer for a refugee resettlement agency and former US State Department analyst, noted in a guest essay (12/4/25) that Lakanwal’s
commando unit in Afghanistan routinely went on missions targeting some of the most dangerous members of the Taliban, the Islamic State terrorist network and Al Qaeda.
It is not difficult to imagine he came away from those experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder, like so many US servicemembers involved in the war.
Elston argued that the US must reopen its immigration refugee pathway program, which Trump froze and defunded upon his inauguration.
Two days later, right-wing USA Today columnist Dace Potas (12/6/25) acknowledged that Lakanwal “had helped CIA operations” and “had difficulties assimilating due to post-traumatic stress disorder.” Yet he still argued that US immigration policy needs to be reworked to “assimilation-focused immigration and a merit-based criteria.”
Blaming one tragic act on a community of 200,000 people, as the New York Post (and Trump) repeatedly did, is blatantly absurd and racist. Legal immigrants are 74% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans, while illegal immigrants are half as likely, according to the libertarian think tank Cato Institute analysis of data from 2010 through 2023.
Although the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal mostly challenged this racist argument, their other opinions remained limited to the political blame game between the Trump and Biden administrations, and in doing so, ignored one of the most important issues that needed to be publicly discussed: the consequences of US foreign intervention.
Ken Klippenstein (12/6/25): “For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious. But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not.”
The Trump FBI is drawing up an enemies list that could encompass well over half the US public: Do you “advance…opposition to law and immigration enforcement”? Do you have “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders”? Show an “adherence to radical gender ideology,” meaning you think trans people exist? Do you exhibit (what the Trump administration would interpret as) “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-Christianity”? Do you display “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion and morality”?
Congratulations—you may be headed for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.” “Terrorism,” of course, is the magic word that strips you of all sorts of legal protections, especially in the post-9/11 era.
This is from a Justice Department memo obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein (12/6/25)—which goes on to instruct the FBI to set up “a cash reward system” for people who turn in those promoting such thoughtcrime, and “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members” of groups with these dangerous ideas.
This is the implementation of the Trump administration’s avowed policy of criminalizing dissent—in the words of the NSPM-7 decree, outlawing “organized campaigns of…radicalization…designed to…change or direct policy outcomes” (FAIR.org, 10/3/25; CounterSpin, 10/17/25)—and as such is another giant step towards authoritarianism. Establishment media didn’t see it that way, however.
Reuters‘ Sarah N. Lynch (12/4/25) reported on the DoJ memo entirely from the point of view of the DoJ.
As Klippenstein (12/9/25) pointed out, virtually no corporate media outlets covered this catastrophic memo, and those who did report on it did a generally poor job. The Guardian headline (12/5/25) was “Pam Bondi Tells Law Enforcement Agencies to Investigate Antifa Groups for ‘Tax Crimes,’” and Bloomberg Law (12/5/25) had “Bondi Orders FBI Extremism Intelligence Review with Antifa Focus”—completely misleading framing that suggests that if you’re not “Antifa,” the memo isn’t about you.
Bondi orders FBI to prioritize domestic terrorism investigations
Memo targets antifa and similar groups
FBI to develop strategies to disrupt criminal networks
DoJ calls for prosecuting extremist groups for tax crimes
The DoJ is issuing marching orders for a witch hunt, and Reuters presents it with a straight face as an effort to go after “domestic terrorism,” “criminal networks” and “extremist groups” who commit “tax crimes.” Who could object to that?
The Lever (12/8/25) reports that the DoJ memo “encourages the bureau to investigate incidents as old as five years “to map the full network of culpable actors.”
Among corporate media outlets, only The Hill (12/5/25), a specialty outlet aimed at congressional staffers and lobbyists, conveyed the enormity of the directive. Its second paragraph read:
Bondi’s memo could be the starting point for charges against a number of left-leaning advocacy groups and nonprofits the Trump administration has accused without evidence of having ties to extremists.
The Hill‘s Rebecca Beitsch quoted Andrew Bataj of the group Whistleblower Aid, “This memo expressly seeks to redefine political dissent against the president as domestic terrorism.”
But beyond that, to get actual coverage of the threat DoJ is posing to civil liberties and democracy itself, you had to go to independent outlets like Democracy Now! (12/8/25) and the Lever (12/8/25). The counter-revolution will not be televised.
Art by Rama Duwaji, who is married to Zohran Mamdani.
Zohran Mamdani’s November 4 victory in the New York City mayoral election was precedent setting for numerous reasons: The candidate’s youth, religious faith and political ideology were all decisive breaks from politicians locally and nationally. Mamdani’s win was also notable because the spouse of a political cartoonist (Comics Beat, 6/26/25) has been elected mayor of the largest city in the country.
Indeed, cartoons and caricatures played an important if under-reported role in the election campaign. They were, though, generally of a different—and worse—quality than those put out by Rama Duwaji, the mayor-elect’s wife.
He’s a Commie—get it?
Right-wing political cartoonists, for obvious reasons, had a strong desire to see the young, Muslim, democratic socialist lose the election. They utilized a variety of attacks on Mamdani, usually evoking either the Red Scare or Islamophobic tropes.
The Statue of Liberty’s association with immigration gives this Michael Ramirez cartoon another layer of meaning.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Michael Ramirez, syndicated by Creators Syndicate, has come under fire throughout his career over his depictions of Muslims (FAIR.org, 3/27/25). In 2007, he drew the country of Iran as an open sewer, with swarming cockroaches sweeping out to infest neighboring countries (Columbus Dispatch, 9/29/07). In 2023, a Ramirez cartoons showing a snarling, hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas” was pulled from the Washington Post (11/8/23) after readers criticized it as “racist” and “dehumanizing.”
Ramirez’s cartoons about Mamdani have been of similar quality. The punchline to many of Ramirez’s jokes is to simply link Mamdani with the Soviet Union, a nation that ceased to exist a few months after Mamdani was born. One pre-election cartoon depicted an uneasy Statue of Liberty wielding a hammer and sickle in lieu of a torch (Creators Syndicate, 8/26/25).
A few days after Halloween, Ramirez drew the candidate as a Bela Lugosi–esque vampire with a hammer and sickle pendant (Creators Syndicate, 11/3/25). (Ramirez’s lazy cartoon missed an obvious pun: Why not draw Mamdani as Marx’s “specter of Communism”?) Another recent Ramirez piece parodied the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a Karl Marx balloon holding the by-now-ubiquitous hammer and sickle (Ramireztoons, 11/30/25).
A cartoon by Gary Varvel illustrating the disgusting threat of…city-owned groceries?
Gary Varvel’s Mamdani (New Hampshire Union Leader, 6/8/25), although not a creature of the night, was similarly inhuman: a rotten apple, filled with snake-like worms labeled “tax the rich” and “city-owned groceries.” One worm, labeled “global intifada” (a phrase Mamdani never uttered), appears to wear a turban—a cheap cartoon cliché for “Muslim.” Varvel’s previous work compared pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazis (Daily Cartoonist, 11/2/23), so his animus towards anyone supporting Palestine has a history (FAIR.org, 3/27/25).
Varvel (New Hampshire Union Leader, 10/25/25) also took time to red-bait Mamdani, drawing him hoisting a hammer and sickle on the side of a U-Haul truck bearing the slogan “If he wins, call us!” Varvel’s cartoon fails to make its own point effectively: His intent is to imply that Mamdani’s election would lead to an exodus from New York, but a progressive reader could infer that Mamdani’s administration will be so successful as to result in an influx of new residents.
Discrimination deserved
Steve Kelly cartoon telling Muslims not to complain about Islamophobia.
Henry Payne, syndicated by Andrews McMeel (11/6/25), slurred Mamdani as a lethal antisemite, depicting him as a cab driver in a Red Army uniform with an “I [Skull] Jews” bumper sticker. Tom Stiglich’s imaginary TV viewer reacts to Mamdani by calling him “a Communist who hates America” (X, 10/30/25). It’s apparent that as the term “socialist” has lost its sting; as it’s been applied to every politician to the left of Joe McCarthy, red-baiters have moved on to “Communist” and “Marxist” as their preferred terms of derision.
After Mamdani brought up a hijab-wearing aunt’s decision to stop using the subway due to post-9/11 fears of Islamophobia, Steve Kelley took the opportunity to dismiss such fears and bash Mamdani for bringing them up. Indeed, Human Rights Watch reported that after the attacks there was a major spike in hate crimes directed against Arabs, Muslims and those suspected to be, including three murders. But Kelley created a fictional New Yorker to stare Mamdani down and lecture him that “her aunt stopped taking the subway after 9/11 because she was incinerated in the North Tower” (X, 10/27/25).
Cartoons like Kelley’s, and others in a similar vein by Tom Stiglich (Creators Syndicate, 10/28/25) and Gary McCoy (Cagle Cartoons, 10/28/25), have an obvious point: Muslims like Mamdani should not protest any prejudice they encountered after 9/11. The implication is that all Muslims were in some way to blame for the attacks, and therefore deserved to be discriminated against.
‘Really disgusting’
A.F. Branco wants you to know that the Communist Muslim will kill you.
Cartoonist A.F. Branco may have made the most tasteless attacks on Mamdani. One of his early efforts shows Mamdani as an unlikely combination of Stalinist and Islamic fundamentalist (Creators Syndicate, 7/21/25). Mamdani wears a turban in the cartoon, something he doesn’t do in reality, and wields a hammer and sickle against “The Big Apple.” This naked Red Scare/Islamophobic smear was a preview of the depths Branco would soon sink to.
In October, he drew a red plane labeled “Mamdani” with a Communist hammer and sickle on the side. The plane is about to crash into one of the Twin Towers, labeled “NY City.” The cartoon’s visibility increased after right-wing political pundit Larry Elder posted it on X (10/21/25).
Except for right-wing troll Laura Loomer, who responded to the image “100%,” most of the reactions were strongly negative. The cartoon’s evocation of the 9/11 attacks came in for particular criticism. Sports broadcaster Roberto Abramowitz said the cartoon was “really disgusting.” Other social media commenters called Branco’s work “sick” and “tasteless” (Independent, 10/21/25). A few days later, Mamdani himself blasted the cartoon at a speech before the Islamic Cultural Center in the Bronx (CBS, 10/24/25).
Branco’s work fit snugly with Andrew Cuomo’s Islamophobic campaign against Mamdani. On a radio show (New Republic, 10/23/25), Cuomo quizzed rhetorically, “God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” When the host responded, “He’d be cheering,” Cuomo laughed and added, “That’s another problem.”
Election results indicated that this dark, paranoid worldview was rejected by the voters of New York City. Right-wing cartoonists had waged a relentless campaign through right-wing and corporate media to tar Mamdani as a dangerous political extremist and religious radical, but were unable to hoodwink the electorate with their smears and propaganda. Nevertheless, their images served to normalize both Islamophobia and red-baiting–a negative achievement that will make actually governing a diverse city that much more difficult.
Jessica Kutz (19th, 11/21/25): “At the same time that tradeswomen are urging more to be done to address gender-based violence in the workplace, the Trump administration has curtailed resources.”
Media coverage focuses on violence: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Yeah, but only some violence, sometimes. How much have you read, for example, about Amber Czech?
She was a 20-year-old welder in Minnesota, and as the 19th’s Jessica Kutz (11/21/25) notes, in one of the rare media acknowledgements, “Women make up just 6% of welders in the country, and, as with other male-dominated occupations, it came with the risk of isolation and bullying.”
In Czech’s case, that bullying ended with a male coworker allegedly bludgeoning her to death, because, as he told law enforcement, he didn’t like her, and had been planning to murder her for some time.
I saw reports on this from tradeswomen outlets, social media and some local outlets. But it seemed to barely rate as a national story; that coverage came largely from outlets that lean heavily on crime coverage (e.g., New York Post, 11/13/25; New York Daily News, 11/13/25; People, 11/14/25).
It has nothing to tell us, evidently, about broader trends or influences. In this case, it seems, it’s just an errant individual. Nothing to see here.
The 19th reported:
Last fall, the Tradeswomen Taskforce and Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit focused on gender justice in workplaces, won a $350,000 grant to address gender-based violence in the workplace.
The Trump administration canceled that program.
The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat (11/6/25) hosted a debate between two conservative women over exactly how feminism had been bad for the workplace.
Meanwhile in Italy, parliament passed a law recognizing the crime of femicide, or gender-based violence against women, becoming the 30th country to do so. It’s far from a panacea—difficult to prosecute, and reliant on a carceral solution—but it acknowledges the problem and creates a way to clearly track it. In the United States, femicide rates are estimated to be more than seven times higher than in Italy, yet it prompts little media attention or outrage (Ms., 4/17/25).
The New York Times apparently didn’t have space to cover Czech’s murder, but they did have room for Ross Douthat to host a debate (11/6/25) on “Did Women Ruin the Workplace”—later changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”—and for David French (10/23/25) to muse on “How Women Destroyed the West.”
The New York Times headline (11/3/25) presents the racist group chat as something that happened to William Hendrix—as opposed to a group that was racist because its members were.
In the latest installment of sympathetic media profiles in the “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door” genre, the New York Times (11/3/25) offers a more than 3,000-word article on William Hendrix, one of the 12 Young Republican state leaders whose bigoted and violent group chat messages were leaked and reported on in October (Politico, 10/14/25), resulting in a nationwide uproar.
Under the headline “How a Kansas Republican Became Part of a Racist, Antisemitic Group Chat,” the Times‘ Sabrina Tavernise and Georgia Gee profile Hendrix, 24, who lost his job at the Kansas State Capitol as a result of the scandal. Readers are treated first to a photo of a thoughtful-looking Hendrix, wearing a navy suit with an American flag pin on the lapel, with the caption, “William Hendrix, who has not spoken publicly about the group chat until now, said that he was stunned by the intensity of the uproar and the fallout on his life.”
A later photo shows Hendrix gazing out his car window at the state capitol building, “where he once worked.”
Described at various points as “ambitious,” “young” and “bullied for his weight” in school, Hendrix is given ample opportunity to explain himself, with only mild pushback from the Times. Meanwhile, the rest of his party is largely exonerated from any role in its own radicalization. As I pointed out for FAIR (11/16/20) when covering a previous iteration of this phenomenon from the Times, the problem journalists must confront isn’t that they haven’t probed deeply enough into the far-right psyche; it’s that they refuse to stop normalizing it.
‘Seemed like an overstatement’
Hendrix joined his high school paper after the journalism teacher “noticed a spark,” the New York Times (11/3/25) reported.
The piece purported to be an attempt to understand how Hendrix became politicized as a far-right activist. It traced Hendrix’s life from his “precarious” childhood with a father who was a Democrat, to his deciding that when peers criticized Trump for being racist, “it all seemed like an overstatement.”
He joined the school newspaper and covered a Trump appearance in Topeka; when Trump pointed at the press pool and called them “fake news,” Hendrix was starstruck, saying, “That’s something I’ve only ever seen him do on TV, and now he’s doing it for me.”
Meeting Andrew Dwyer—then-leader of the Kansas Young Republicans, fan of white nationalist Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes, and soon-to-be member of the infamous group chat—Hendrix said, “We got on like a house on fire.” The Times explained: “Mr. Dwyer was older and more experienced, but Mr. Hendrix said he saw a similar motivation: to stand up for working-class people.”
See, their connection is all about good intentions, not vitriol.
‘A term of endearment’
The original Politico piece (10/14/25) treated it as a story about how racism, antisemitism and misogyny in the Republican Party were revealed by a group chat leak.
In the Politico expose, Hendrix was singled out for his prolific use of the N-word in the group chat and his racial slurs: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food,” he wrote in the chat. “Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”
The Times recounted these details, and offered Hendrix’s point of view:
Looking back, Mr. Hendrix sees how his texts could be offensive. But he said he did not intend them that way. The group, he said, was firing off zingers at each other, like towel snaps in a locker room.
“We were making fun of each other,” he said. “Who can out-ridiculous who?”
This was his generation’s breaking of taboos, he said. He would never use this language with someone he did not know or did not like, he said, but saying it to a close friend feels transgressive and fun. He pointed out that the person he was insulting with the racist language was white and a friend.
Mr. Hendrix said the N-word was used all the time in his majority Black and Hispanic high school and middle school, and among video game players. A hard “er” at the end was a racist term, he argued, and his spelling—with a soft “uh” or “a” at the end—was a term of endearment.
You could possibly imagine quoting an unrepentant racist defending his use of racial slurs in this way to hold him accountable, immediately pushing back against his absurd, self-serving argument. But that’s not what the Times did. It chose next to cite two “left-leaning” organizers who work with online communities saying that “the language is much more common than people think,” and that it “can help eager-to-please members of the tribe fit in.”
‘Younger, more rebellious’
“Maybe I’ll go back to trade school,” the New York Times (11/3/25) quoted Hendrix, “and disappear into the blue-collar world and no one will ever hear from me again.”
The article finally “balanced” all these paragraphs by noting that “words have meaning, and Mr. Hendrix was leaning into something that was also quite dangerous,” pointing to a neo-Nazi reference Dwyer made in the chat. But that brief pushback concluded with Hendrix saying, “That’s not the Alex I know.”
Earlier in the piece, Tavernise and Gee called “the full picture” of the story—not just the one Hendrix himself told, and to which they devoted much of their time—”more troubling,” one in which “a younger, more rebellious generation of activists who grew up online…are bringing the language and ideas they find there into Republican activism.”
“If the language is repeated often enough, that builds a numbness to the ideas behind it, and can even help radicalize,” the Times said. It’s fairly vague and mild criticism, considering “the language” they’re talking about but don’t explicitly name is hate speech—a term not found in the 3,000-word article.
The piece described Dwyer and his extremist friends as “irreverent,” and quoted a Republican colleague saying about the white nationalist language some of his peers use: “It’s hard because some of these people mean it, and some of them don’t.” Just as a reminder, he’s talking about people who say things like “I love Hitler,” refer to Black people as monkeys, and “joke” about sending people to the gas chamber (all of which happened in the group chat).
While it gave Hendrix a largely sympathetic hearing, the Times also painted him as an outlier from his party. The article said “many” prominent Kansas Republicans were “stunned” by the leaked group chat. Several state-level Republican leaders were quoted talking about how they have worked to root out white nationalists. (As the Times failed to note, Hendrix was working for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has been an outspoken nativist for decades.)
‘My entire life caved in’
“In person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” the New York Times (11/25/17) wrote in a 2017 profile of a Nazi activist.
But as for the blatant and proud bigotry coming from the very top, the Times can scarcely be bothered to scrutinize it. The only mention of any role Trump has played in the rise of bigotry in his party came about 20 paragraphs in:
It does not help that President Trump has blurred boundaries. In 2022, he dined with Nick Fuentes, the avowed racist and antisemite. And Mr. Trump recently defended the media host Tucker Carlson for his sympathetic interview with Mr. Fuentes.
One sentence also mentioned Vice President J.D. Vance’s defense of the group chat participants:
Vice President J.D. Vance, who has made a point of reaching out to young men, posted that he refused “to join the pearl clutching” about what was essentially “edgy offensive jokes” made by “kids.”
The piece ended by returning to Hendrix’s point of view:
Today, Mr. Hendrix is still trying to process what happened.
He lost a job he had loved. Prominent state Republicans denounced him. He was deluged with messages calling him a racist. His picture, one that he hated, was everywhere, including on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
“It felt like my entire life caved in,” he said.
For now, he is focused on practical things, like paying his bills. He just found a job this week, this time far from politics.
“Maybe I’ll go back to trade school,” he said, “and disappear into the blue-collar world and no one will ever hear from me again.”
He said he has no regrets. And he continues to talk with people from the chat, including Mr. Dwyer.
“While the whole world has something to say about us,” Mr. Hendrix said, “there’s at least 11 other people that I know for certain know who I am—and I know who they are.”
“And,” he added, “we’ve shared in it together.”
It’s hard to imagine Hendrix—or Trump—finding much of anything to criticize in the Times profile. In defense of its 2017 “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door” article, Times national editor Marc Lacey wrote: “What we think is indisputable…is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them.”
There’s a significant difference between shedding light on someone you deem “extreme”—in order to hold them accountable—and simply giving them a spotlight. In its sympathetic profiles of far-right actors, the Times makes little effort to do the former, with the effect instead of simply normalizing racism and fascism.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
This week on CounterSpin: A militarized US Drug Enforcement Administration force declared they’d taken out drug traffickers in the Caribbean, killing some of them in what was sold as a successful operation. Locals on the ground reported differently, saying these people weren’t drug traffickers, just human beings who happened to be on the river and got shot up by US forces who were not attacked, as they claimed, but just killed innocent people because they were given orders to kill them.
It should sound familiar—but this isn’t today in Venezuela; it’s 2012 in Honduras. An inspector general review from the State Department and the Justice Department found that, no, this was not a Honduran operation, or a “joint operation” the DEA were helping with; it was a DEA operation, and it killed four innocent people and injured others in a remote, Afro-Indigenous part of Honduras. The story that the DEA pushed on Congress and the press corps was just a lie.
But you’d hardly know that history reading current coverage of Honduras, where, as we record on December 4, the presidential election is still in question. Not in question: the US’s long history of intervening—violently, dramatically, unaccountably—in Honduras.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Jean Su about challenging COP30 narratives for the November 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The decision coming out of COP30, the climate conference held this year in Belem in northern Brazil, didn’t mention the words “fossil fuels,” much less demand a necessary reduction in their use. The Associated Press dryly notes that this fell far short of many delegates’ expectations.
But the general vibe seems to be that no one actually expected an agreement that would actually keep warming to the agreed-upon 1.5° Celsius, especially not at a gathering swarming with fossil fuel lobbyists, and the institutional acceptance, if you will, of the industry’s role in shaping the policy that needs to dislodge them.
in the end, the talks were stymied by the widening gulf between the world’s biggest emitters and the poorest, most vulnerable countries, which are pleading for a more ambitious collective response to climate change.
To which we might also respond, “You don’t say.”
What’s the difference between acknowledging the conflicts that are driving predictable death and destruction, and using the power of information to challenge and change them? And what else happened at COP30? Were there, are there, other stories that include different voices, and that start where so much corporate coverage ends?
Jean Su is director of the energy justice program, as well as senior attorney, at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jean Su.
Jean Su: Great. Thanks so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: I wanted to start by asking about what the COPs are intended to do. I guess my question is, before we move on to other things, what was the point of signing the Paris Agreement if there was no accountability apparatus built into it? Have the goals of that original conference shifted, or have they just been ignored, or was the framework flawed to begin with?
JS: These are all deep existential questions that I ask every single year, so this is fantastic. But, you know, we’ve had these Conferences of the Parties for now 30 years. This is COP30. And the thrust behind it was originally a thrust from scientists and governments that were recognizing that human-caused climate change, including the combustion of fossil fuels, was driving a desperate crisis that is unfolding in front of us right now with deadly storms, wildfires, drought, famine and, eventually, civil conflict.
So the Paris Agreement was signed 10 years ago, and that was a big attempt to get us more on track in terms of a certain goal. So scientists had come to the point where they could say 1.5° of warming in this world would lead to catastrophic results, especially for the Global South and small island nation states like Kiribati and Tuvalu, whose very existence would be completely annihilated because of warming and rising sea levels.
So scientists and governments agreed that they would attempt to limit warming by 1.5° Celsius. And so that is a North Star, if you will. And then in the agreement, they agreed to several things, and most people, if you’re living in any type of nation state, you would think that these are all really weak requirements, which is true, they are, but they were the only thing that nation states could agree to. And some of those include an update every five years, a goal for different nation states to say, “This is how much we are going to be cutting our carbon emissions in order to try to meet that collective goal of limiting warming to 1.5°.”
So with all of that, we are 10 years out from Paris. And the very upsetting thing coming into this COP was that at the beginning of this COP, only 60% of nation states had actually turned in their climate targets. So originally we had 100% participation in the first few years after the Paris Agreement, and now we’re only having 60% participation, of merely saying what your goals are and this is how much you want to cut. So it’s a transparency mechanism. It’s supposed to keep nation states on track, because they have to report back to everybody. And even then, 40% of nation states didn’t even want to do it, and couldn’t even do it. So I think we’re in a tough spot.
The big push, though, that has occurred in the last 10 years is this push on fossil fuels. So in the Paris Agreement, there is absolutely no mention of fossil fuels. There is only one mention of renewable energy. That is a really stark reality for the global agreement that’s supposed to be addressing the climate emergency.
And so we, and my organization in particular, has pushed on that fossil fuel agenda for several years. And actually, two years ago, eight years after the Paris Agreement, in Dubai, we finally won a landmark decision there, which uttered the words “fossil fuels.” And it said that nation states would transition away from fossil fuels in an equitable and fair manner. And that was a huge victory for so many advocates, communities on the ground, the countries that are suffering the most from fossil fuel damage. Those were an incredible win, and a landmark win, two years ago.
But the problem with it–it had several problems. It actually had several loopholes, including allowing for gas as a transitional fuel to still be combusted. But even then, the reality was that you have this nice decision, but how do you actually implement it? So what is the game plan to make this thing operationalized?
And so those are questions about, well, who should go first? Shouldn’t it be Global North countries that go first, because they actually have the means to transition off of fossil fuels? And then, meanwhile, how do you help Global South countries through that transition?
So we have been in talks with so many African countries, South American countries, even Brazil this time talked about this conundrum that Global South countries have. And they said, “Look, we do want to phase out of fossil fuels. We are bearing the burden of climate harms, but we are essentially hooked on fossil fuels, because all of our infrastructure has been built on this, because global producers in the Global North have really shoved fossil fuels into our economy. We need money to actually phase out of fossil fuels. So Global North countries, given their wealth, their historic contribution to the climate emergency, they should help fund our transition off of fossil fuels.”
And the really heartbreaking part, in certain parts of Africa, is that African countries were saying, “You’re not giving us any funding, so we are going to continue to basically extract gas from our lands in order to pay for our renewable energy.” And, very similar, President Lula in Brazil, this time hosting the COP, said, “We’re drilling in the Amazon for oil, because we need money to transition off of fossil fuels to get more renewable energy.” So you have this really horrific reality, where poor countries need to depend on extracting their own fossil fuel resources in order to even buy renewable energy infrastructure, to transition off.
So what this COP was trying to do is say, “Hey, we need a game plan, and we need a game plan where Global North countries can actually fund Global South countries to get this transition on its way.” Anything that lacks that funding is completely empty.
So that is where the standoff occurred at this COP. There was no game plan that was operationalized, because that widening gulf, as you said, between poor countries and wealthy countries was at that chokehold of, “If you, as a rich country, can’t give us, as a poor country, funds to help us transition off of fossil fuels, then we’re not going agree to an empty statement to transition off of fossil fuels, or some game plan that doesn’t have this necessary funding.”
So that’s really the heart of what’s going on at these negotiations, 10 years from Paris, however you want to judge it. The fact that countries are actively debating how to operationalize getting off of fossil fuels is progress. Is 10 years too slow? Absolutely. Is this year still not operationalizing this agreement a problem? Absolutely. Is the fact that they are talking about it, at the very least acknowledging it, something of progress? Yes, it is. So all of those truths are held together, and it’s a tricky issue.
Now, the really good part about this is that President Lula from Brazil was the one to ring the alarm bells at the beginning of this COP. And he is dedicated to getting this game plan off of fossil fuels actionized in some way. He said at the beginning of this COP, “This is in Brazil, we are at the doorstep of the Amazon. The Amazon is the global symbol of the harms of the climate emergency. So we need to phase out of fossil fuels, and we need a game plan for that.” The UNFCCC, through this COP, didn’t deliver it. So he said at the end of the COP that he was going to try to actionize it in some other ways.
And one of those ways is that a whole other group of countries, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, agreed at this summit to host a summit in Colombia in April that would actually try to put together a game plan to phase out of fossil fuels. So it’s outside of this UN process, but it is a group of countries that are dedicated to getting a handle on fossil fuels. So that is an incredible feat. And the president of Brazil said that he would lean on that process to see what could actually happen outside of this corrupted process with Global North countries, and big oil and gas producers like Saudi Arabia.
JJ: You know, I appreciate that. And I think it’s important to understand, “just transition” is two words: It’s “transition,” but also “just transition.” And I think folks can think about it, if they haven’t, if they think about coal mining in the United States, for example. We want the US to come off of coal, but when you have entire communities and states that are funded, beyond having just a history of doing that, that’s the way they survive, and they say, “Hey, you know what? We still would like to keep our livelihood,” well, it can be easy for you from a distance to say, “Oh my God, we have to phase out coal.” Yes, but there needs to be a just transition.
And so, picking up from that, I understand that there was a flotilla of Indigenous groups and people who came to Belem to call attention to the fact that, as Lula says, the Amazon is not just a decorative backdrop for a conference, and to call attention to their particular set of issues. And the representative I saw was saying that one of their goals with that flotilla of Indigenous folks was to build solidarity across borders, and structures of solidarity across borders. So we often think of, what does each country need to do? And they were saying that people need to be working together across borders. That’s where some hope lies, you think?
Jean Su: “It’s the people, it’s the citizenry of the world who are going toe to toe with the handful of politicians who are driving disastrous decisions for us.”
JS: I have been attending the COPs for 10 years now. The Paris Agreement was my first one. And the most moving part about the COPs, as an observer, a lobbyist and an advocate trying to push countries, is that it’s not about country-to-country disputes. At the end of the day, what these COPs are about are the public versus these politicians and their corporate interests. That is the actual conflict, or the face-to-face standoff that’s happening.
What is incredible, for this COP in particular, is that we were at the heart of the Amazon, and it was the Indigenous COP. And every day there were Indigenous advocates who were trying to get into the COP, because they were completely banned from getting in. Of the Indigenous advocates who were allowed to go in, they staged protests inside, protests were outside. And it was really led by Indigenous people who are suffering the most from the climate emergency and whose homes we were on. We were at the heart of the Amazon, and it is their homes that are being absolutely destroyed by fossil fuel combustion abroad, and oil extraction in real time there.
These are civil society organizations from around the world, communities that are being harmed around the world, are all able to come together in one physical place, and were able to look politicians in the eye and say, “This is totally unacceptable.” You know, it’s different from when you are brokering deals in isolated hallways; this is a moment where civil society, communities, actual people who are being harmed by the climate emergency are face to face with people who are literally deciding their fate in many ways. And I think that that’s the important part about this COP. It’s the public, it’s the people, it’s the citizenry of the world who are going toe to toe with the handful of politicians who are driving disastrous decisions for us.
The most moving part was–there were several Indigenous protests, but one of them, in particular, was Indigenous women from the Amazon actually staged a protest; they weren’t allowed to go into the site, and they staged a protest at the door of the COP, basically jamming up anybody’s ability to get in. And it lasted for around an hour, and everybody gets so flustered, because the negotiators can’t get into their meetings. But it was taking this moment to acknowledge that Indigenous women—I mean, I think the world’s wisdom is in their minds about how to take care of Mother Earth—are saying, “Stop, you’re killing us, and you are killing our ecosystems. You’re killing our species, you’re killing us. We have to phase out of fossil fuels.” These are the moments that really are the most important at these conferences.
JJ: When we last spoke in 2021, you were part of a mobilization in Washington, DC, which was called “People versus Fossil Fuels.” And that still seems like the most useful frame for this conversation.
JS: Yeah. And I’d say “fossil fuels” is another word for rich petro-state countries, including the United States. So it is a handful of countries that are blocking progress for the rest of the world.
JJ: Let me ask you, on that note, and I am going to let you go, but things as they are, it was no surprise that the White House declined to send a delegate. That reflects both their anti-science, “where’s the money at” view on climate, but also their disdain for international arrangements that require listening to other countries.
But I wonder what you make of the take that I saw in the New York Times, which was that
the disappointment of the summit was a result of America’s absence. While the United States…has not always been a champion of ambitious climate action, it had consistently succeeded in one thing: demanding that major economies with high greenhouse gas emissions, like China and Saudi Arabia, take on more responsibility. Without the United States, diplomats in Belem acknowledged, that enormous source of pressure was gone.
I wonder how you respond to the notion of the US’s major international role on climate policy being “it pushes the bad guys to do better.”
JS: The US’s presence there is a double-edged sword. Yes, they do press China and Saudi Arabia to agree to things that, certainly, Saudi Arabia would not agree to otherwise. But, at the same time, they limit ambition, as you said. There’s a huge limit, because the US has vested fossil fuel interests of their own, and they are supportive of “transitional fuels.” The US, when we protested and advocated the Biden administration to put a hold on fossil fuels, they completely rejected us.
So the Biden administration and the Trump administration, and all the other administrations before that, have gotten the United States to become the No. 1 producer and exporter of fracked gas in the world, one of the top crude oil producers and exporters. That’s not just a Trump administration issue. That is a Biden administration issue and everything before that, which means that anybody who’s negotiating on behalf of the United States at the State Department knows that that is the ultimate interest of the United States.
So what this COP showed is, in the absence of a global power whose interests are vested in fossil fuels, in that absence, who is going to take the mantle to do anything on fossil fuels and the climate emergency? And I think this year is a really interesting test case of how that is going to work. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, everybody held back on making particular commitments to fossil fuels. On the other hand, you saw China attempt to step up a bit in leadership, because of their massive outsourcing of renewable energy.
And then you saw the EU really disappointing a lot of people in a lot of ways. The EU has been a moral compass, is certainly seen as a more moral player than the United States in these talks, but certainly also benefiting from Big Brother US in the back, to protect them from actually making real commitments.
What is not surprising is that the people, the countries whose moral voices really are the North Star in these talks, are Colombia, the small island nation states…. Those are the countries that understand that their own survival, and the world’s survival, depends on phasing out fossil fuels. And that’s why the real leaders of this COP may not be the most resourced, but they are the ones who are following science. And they are the heroes coming out of this COP.
Colombia, in particular, is going to be taking the mantle of hosting the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, that’s its official title, in April of 2026, along with the Netherlands. Those two countries are rising as super important leaders in this fight. And if they can’t get something done in this 200–nation state arena, they are going to be pushing as hard as possible for something to get done outside of it.
And the important part, I think, about the US not being here as well is that it’s a double- edged sword, because they are an obstructor to actual movement on phasing out fossil fuels. So what I would urge all nation states to do is use these three years–which I hope at the end of three years will be the end of the Trump administration, and we have a more climate and science-based government coming in in the US–but take these three years, and pass as much binding frameworks as we can, because with the US not there, they can no longer obstruct. And that means that nation states can treat the US as the pariah that it is, and get down some binding frameworks that will, in the end, when the US comes back, bind the US to more ambitious targets, and more ambitious pathways to phasing out fossil fuels, and funding that renewable energy transition for the Global South.
JJ: Very finally, I usually ask people what they’d like to see more or less of in media coverage. I’m thinking another way to put that, on this issue in particular, is what do you see as the difference between the news media we have and the news media we need to move us forward in addressing climate disasters?
JS: First, I think one of the tough parts about this COP is that the media market is very concentrated in the United States, and that’s where most of the funding is. They are extremely overwhelmed, because of all the things that the Trump administration is doing. And so the coverage of this, the amount of people they sent to the COP, all of that has diminished significantly. So we have a battered media market in the US, and that has just knock-on effects in terms of media around the world.
A lot of the mainstream message is, to their credit, focused on the fossil fuel story, which is a huge change from even five years ago. So I think there is a lot of progress that has been made there. But what I’d like to see more of is, actually, the heroic stories that have come out of this, which are–it doesn’t have to be based on the Global North perspective, necessarily. Like, yes, the fossil fuel producers are the evil ones in this, but also let’s raise up Colombia, the Netherlands, the small island nation states, these countries that have been steadfast for 30 years in saying that we need to follow science, and we need to phase out of fossil fuels. They should be the heroes of this story, versus just focusing on the anti-heroes.
And on top of that, I think it’s the Indigenous stories, it’s the stories of, really, the global citizenry around the world. I think, in telling that story of the global citizenry, people should recognize and see themselves in these stories, that this is not some isolated thing that happened in Brazil, that this is actually your own fight, our own fight collectively. And we have to take those fights absolutely back home at a local level, at a state level, and at a national level. That’s what actually matters for climate action. And we can make the most progress here on the ground right now. And know that you are not alone, that you are fighting shoulder to shoulder with people around the world who care just the same as you do.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jean Su; she’s director of the energy justice program and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. You can follow their work online at BiologicalDiversity.org. Jean Su, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
President Donald Trump, having campaigned heavily on anti-trans fear mongering, issued an executive order within days of taking office that banned federal support for gender-affirming care. That same order commanded the secretary of Health and Human Services to produce a report on “best practices” for the care of trans youth.
When the report was released in May, exactly zero people were surprised that its conclusions echoed the executive order’s anti-trans stance—condemning gender-affirming care and instead recommending “exploratory” therapy—and were grounded in ideology, not science or medical expertise. The May report was not peer-reviewed and did not even disclose its authors’ names. And it was sharply criticized by every major medical association and several rights groups (e.g., Human Rights Campaign, 5/1/25; Lambda Legal, 5/1/25).
A continuing sham
Erin in the Morning (11/20/25) noted that the Health & Human Services report’s authors were missing “any actual transgender people, medical professionals with notable experience treating trans people, or any academics who have conducted principal research on patients with gender dysphoria.”
Now, as the Trump administration is working on new rules to further block gender-affirming care for youth, the HHS has re-released the report—summarized by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as showing that gender-affirming care is “malpractice”—which now discloses its nine authors and claims to have undergone peer review.
As trans-focused news site Erin in the Morning (11/20/25) details, the list of authors excludes “any actual transgender people, medical professionals with notable experience treating trans people, or any academics who have conducted principal research on patients with gender dysphoria.”
Instead, the primary qualification for selection of authors seemed to have been skepticism of or flat-out opposition to gender-affirming care. As Erin in the Morning points out, one author previously compared gender-affirming care for youth to Nazi eugenics. Another is a political scientist currently funded by the right-wing Manhattan Institute to write anti-trans commentaries; in his dissertation, about why trans people shouldn’t be protected from discrimination under Title IX, he wondered whether “‘gender identity’ [might] be a misunderstood form of erotic desire.”
A third co-founded an anti-trans group listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Yet another, in an op-ed for the right-wing Wall Street Journal opinion section (6/23/25), willfully misrepresented the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of gender dysphoria as “disordered perception.” (The APA explicitly warns against such misinterpretation: “The presence of gender variance is not the pathology, but dysphoria is from the distress caused by the body and mind not aligning and/or societal marginalization of gender-variant people.”)
Moreover, the “peer review” was not anonymous, as is typically done to avoid bias. Assigned Media (11/19/25) points out that the review consists of one highly critical review from the APA—which says the report’s “underlying methodology lacks sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value”—and that the rest, which were “uniformly effusive in their praise…notably fail to include any experts in gender medicine.”
In short, the report was a sham when it was first released, and it continues to be a sham, with even more evidence to demonstrate that, now that the authors’ identities are known. Yet at the Washington Post (11/20/25), it’s a “dispute” among people with “strong opinions”—and the paper offered the side with far less expertise the most space to express those opinions.
‘Strong opinions’
The Washington Post suggests that having expertise in caring for trans people makes one a suspect source, saying “many people deeply involved in the issue have strong opinions.” Meanwhile, people without relevant experience—what the Post calls “more neutral parties”—”may be reluctant to weigh in.”
As the Post‘s Paige Winfield Cunningham and David Ovalle reported it, the administration says the final report shows that gender-affirming care for youth is “dangerous”; meanwhile, “LGBTQ+ healthcare providers and activists” say “the disclosures instead show the administration did not undergo a dispassionate review of evidence and had a predetermined conclusion.”
What is a reader to make of these opposing viewpoints? The Post offered this analysis:
The dispute over the report underscores the challenge of scrutinizing gender transition care amid an international reckoning over how to best treat the rising number of gender-nonconforming children and whether medical interventions have been too broadly administered without robust evidence to justify their use.
The intense polarization surrounding transgender healthcare means many people deeply involved in the issue have strong opinions and more neutral parties may be reluctant to weigh in. Transition care providers and leading medical associations fiercely defend the availability of such care and say the fixation on long-term unknowns overlooks the consequences of a child’s distress as their body develops in a way that does not align with their gender identity.
While the motivations of the Trump administration’s review have been scrutinized given that it was commissioned as part of an executive order to ban the care, other efforts to scrutinize the science have raised concerns about the treatments.
This is a quintessential failure of so-called objective journalism. The Post sees “polarization” and declares that, because both sides have “strong opinions,” the best way to “scrutinize” the dispute is to find “more neutral” sources. This presents a “challenge,” because the Post‘s reporters have a hard time finding such sources; they say that’s because it’s so polarizing.
Actually, it’s hard to find “more neutral” sources who can scrutinize the issue because the overwhelming majority of expert and patient sources are on the side of gender-affirming care. Their “strong opinions” shouldn’t diminish the weight of their argument, it should increase it—because they have actual experience and expertise regarding such care.
The other people “deeply involved in the issue” may have equally strong opinions, but most have very little relevant connection to the issue, besides an apparent opposition to trans people’s rights.
While the Post acknowledges that the HHS review’s “motivations” are suspect, it suggests that in this debate, the more neutral “center”—every well-trained corporate journalist’s homing signal—is to be found in those “other efforts to scrutinize the science” it cites that “have raised concerns about the treatments.”
Here it briefly references the Cass Review from the UK, which, like the HHS report, sought nonexperts to judge gender-affirming care (and which likewise disparaged such care as being insufficiently evidence-based, while touting therapy, which has far less research backing it as a treatment for gender dysphoria). The Post doesn’t dwell on this, but leaves the reader with the impression that the skeptical center is the most reasonable place to be in this debate.
‘Very much a lefty’
FAIR.org (12/16/22): “By pretending to be a rights-loving liberal” while “aiming to restrict people’s gender freedom,” Pamela Paul (like the New York Times) “normalizes the backlash against trans people and their rights.”
The Washington Post skews the perspective even further from the actual experts by offering quotes to nine supporters of the HHS report, including two HHS spokespeople, three authors and four supportive peer reviewers. None are trans. It only quotes two critics, one of whom is trans (though the Post does not note this, perhaps in part because doing so would highlight the fact that none of the nine people quoted who support the report have skin in the game, so to speak). No trans youth or their families—the people most impacted by the restriction of gender-affirming care—are quoted.
In its description of quoted reviewer Lane Strathearn, the Post notes that the “professor of pediatrics” was contacted “out of the blue” to be a reviewer, and that he “used to vote Republican before Trump’s entry into politics but has since voted for Democrats.” Describing reviewer Karleen Gribble—a “professor” who says “one of her areas of focus” is “the potential harms of breast removal surgery,” the Post writes: “She describes herself as ‘very much a lefty’ and said she doesn’t follow American politics.”
These characterizations of the reviewers’ supposed ideologies appear to be an effort by the Post to present them as occupying that trustworthy, “more neutral” center. Strathearn’s quote is: “I see it as just an impossible political situation in the US, where things are so polarized that people can’t sit down and have a reasonable conversation.” Gribble’s is: “Getting people who disagree with my viewpoint to actually engage in the discussion is just about impossible.”
As I pointed out in a piece (FAIR.org, 12/16/22) dissecting the insidiously anti-trans columns of then–New York Times “liberal” columnist Pamela Paul, the MAGA GOP is pushing laws and policies that threaten trans people’s rights, health and lives. But it’s anti-trans liberals—that is, people like Paul, Strathearn and Gribble, framed as liberals by corporate media—who make such policies politically possible. Claiming to fight for things like free speech, feminism and “reasonable conversation” while advancing transphobic pseudoscience, they help blunt opposition to laws targeting a vulnerable minority.
In fact, Gribble, a professor at the Western Sydney School of Nursing and Midwifery, has become a vocal critic of trans-inclusive terminology in recent years. She encouraged the HHS report to emphasize “the risks of using terminology suggesting that people can change their sex.”
Strathearn’s biography and publication history do not appear to include anything substantively related to gender dysphoria; in his review, he describes gender dysphoria as falling under his umbrella of expertise, which is “the care of children with intellectual, developmental and behavioral conditions.” Again: All relevant professional associations (American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association) do not regard gender dysphoria as any of these conditions. Despite his apparent lack of expertise, he attempted to publish a summary about the evidence for gender-affirming care in youth, which, he notes in his review, was rejected by both journals he submitted to. His review called the HHS report “valuable and much needed.”
‘Couldn’t assess’
On top of offering minimal space for critics to push back, the Post misconstrues and downplays the criticism of the American Psychiatric Association’s contribution to the HHS report’s “peer review,” saying: “The American Psychiatric Association concluded it couldn’t assess the report’s rigor because it was not clear how the studies it reviewed were selected or judged.”
The APA did not say it “couldn’t assess the report’s rigor”; it stated quite clearly that “the report’s claims fall short of the standard of methodological rigor that should be considered a prerequisite for policy guidance in clinical care.” It also offered six serious methodological flaws, going well beyond the one—lack of transparency in study selection—that the Post describes.
Pretending that the APA didn’t thoroughly examine and reject the HHS report, though, helps the Washington Post‘s project of taking the focus away from experts—who overwhelmingly support gender-affirming care—and giving the spotlight to less-informed dilettantes whose criticisms of gender dysphoria treatment the paper finds more appealing.
A New York Times graphic (10/3/25) tells the story: The WNBA brings in a lot of money, an a tiny fraction goes to the players.
Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) players have quickly become some of the most recognizable female athletes in the world, with ballooning ticket sales and record-breaking viewership over the past two seasons. As a result, league revenues have soared.
But unlike their male counterparts in the National Basketball Association, who are guaranteed 50% of the NBA’s basketball-related income, WNBA players are not guaranteed a percentage of such income—which includes things like media deals, merchandise and ticket sales, and concessions. So the players haven’t shared in the league’s flood of new revenue; a recent estimate put the women’s 2025 pay at about 7% of revenue.
As a result, the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association (WNBPA) opted out of their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in October of last year, and the league has been careening toward a lockout as negotiations soured, with revenue-sharing the biggest sticking point.
Despite the massive amount of money coming into the WNBA, the league—which is majority-owned by NBA owners—wants to keep their revenue-sharing structure the same, guaranteeing far more profit for owners and investors than for the people who actually play the game. And too many news reports have catered to owners’ interests when reporting on the negotiations between the players’ union and the league.
‘An unstable business’
“Realistically,” WNBA players should hope for a quarter of the share of revenues that their male counterparts get, according to Bleacher Report (9/18/25).
A prominent talking point when it comes to WNBA contract negotiations is profitability. During these negotiations, news outlets have continued to push the idea that the WNBA is not profitable, exclusively relying on anonymous sources, without ever referencing any corroborating financial documents.
NBC Sports’ (11/3/25) recent claimed, for instance, that “the WNBA has had a long reputation of being an unstable business, and one that only lost money rather than made it.” Bleacher Report (9/18/25) wrote that “the WNBA isn’t profitable yet,” and Sports Illustrated (7/19/25) made similar statements about the league’s finances. None of these provided a source for their claims.
The New York Times–owned Athletic (7/24/25) reported:
According to sources with knowledge of the discussions who are not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, the league and teams combined have not been profitable since the WNBA’s inception in 1996.
The Athletic relied on anonymous sources, and did not mention being shown any financial documents to prove their sources’ assertions. News reports never do—because the WNBA has never publicly disclosed its finances. Even the Player’s Association does not have access to the league’s books. Any claims of lack of profitability cannot be independently verified, yet several outlets presented these statements as fact.
‘We won’t see any windfall for years’
The New York Post‘s only source for its claim (10/18/24) that the WNBA loses $40 million a year is “sources close to the situation.”
When numbers regarding the league’s profitability are cited in coverage of the current negotiations, the source is usually an article from the New York Post (10/18/24). Shortly before the deadline to opt out of the CBA in October of 2024—prime time for each side to try to control the narrative—the Post‘s Josh Kosman and Brian Lewis reported that the WNBA would be losing $40 million that year, relying on the testimony of an anonymous NBA executive.
“The WNBA owes the NBA so much we won’t see any windfall for years,” the Post quoted the anonymous source.
Earlier that year, the Washington Post (6/24/24) reported an even higher figure—$50 million—citing “two people with knowledge of the figures.” That article led to headlines like “One Boom Season Won’t Close the Hole in the WNBA’s Balance Sheet” (Front Office Sports, 6/12/24).
Some also cite NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s claim in 2018, reported credulously by the Associated Press (12/28/18), that the WNBA had lost an average of $10 million a year since its inception.
But there is very good reason to doubt the league’s narrative when it comes to its finances. First, as sports economics professor David Berri (Wages of Wins, 10/27/24) points out, the NBA is hardly a reliable source on its own profitability. In the early ’70s, the early ’80s and again as recently as 2011, when it came time to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements with the male players, the NBA claimed it was losing money. In 1972, the league was forced to open its books to an independent financial review as part of an antitrust case. The economist in charge of the review concluded that, because there are countless perfectly legal ways to take profits—for instance, owners who also own the team’s arena can charge very high rent for their team to play in that arena—”the stated book profits are virtually meaningless.”
Similarly, sports management professor Nola Agha (Sherwood News,9/25/24) said that pro leagues commonly use accounting tricks to declare a loss, “even if they’re cash-flow positive, and even if the asset value of the business is increasing every year.” This helps them justify public funding for arenas, and gives them leverage in contract negotiations.
Regarding the WNBA, the growth of the league’s popularity has led to a $2.2 billion, 11-year media deal with ABC, Disney and Amazon, increasing annual media revenue from $60 million to over $200 million. The league also plans on adding three new teams in 2026, each of which has to pay a $25o million expansion fee. That’s five times the expansion fee paid by the Golden State Valkyries just two years earlier.
Even if one takes the league’s claims of a few hundred million in losses at face value—which, as we’ve established, one should clearly not—those purported losses stand to be erased completely in short order, and the spigot of revenue shows no signs of slowing. The New York Liberty, whose current owners bought the team for less than $15 million in 2019, is currently valued at $450 million—suggesting that regardless of on-the-books profits, owning a WNBA team can be a very lucrative endeavor.
A much less often cited figure concerning league finances came from ESPN (3/25/25): over $1 billion, which is what financial services firm Deloitte, an advisor to the WNBA, said league revenues would reach in 2025. That’s after the league brought in $710 million in 2024, according to Deloitte. (If these numbers are accurate, players’ share of 2025 revenue was more like 2.5%.)
So why do reporters take owner claims at face value? Berri (Wages of Wins, 7/28/25) pointed out the absurdity that is apparent if anyone bothered to look a little closer: “While Bloomberg had reported in 2023 that revenues had doubled from 2019 to 2023, the WNBA/NBA insisted that losses had grown five times!”
An even split ‘isn’t realistic’
The Washington Post (9/14/25) asks “whether owners are owed anything for their longtime support of a league that operated at a loss for years”—citing unverified claims of $500 million in losses over 29 years. Not mentioned: The WNBA’s teams are now collectively worth more than $3 billion (Forbes, 6/6/25).
“Pay us what you owe us” became the players’ battle cry in the 2025 All-Star Game, emblazoned on their warm-up shirts. But to hear some in the media tell it, what they were owed was very little.
The Washington Post (9/14/25), under the headline “How Much Are WNBA Players Worth?” said that “players and some economists say it’s straightforward: Players should earn roughly 50% of the league’s revenue, just as the athletes in the big four US men’s sports leagues do.” But owners “say expenses eat up a higher percentage of revenue than they do in bigger, more established leagues, according to people familiar with the league’s thinking.” Ah, the familiar anonymous sources. “Then there is the question of whether owners are owed anything for their longtime support of a league that operated at a loss for years”—which, according to those anonymous sources again, has reached $500 million.
After quoting some players and player advocates, the paper turned yet again to anonymous league sources to explain that a 50/50 split would “threaten sustainability,” because “giving WNBA players the same professional standards as their NBA peers—chartered jets, luxury hotels and the same arenas for smaller crowds—eats up roughly 90% of WNBA revenue.” It’s quite a claim, and yet the Post offered no pushback for the sources to substantiate it.
The Post didn’t attempt to actually put a number on the “how much are they worth” question, but Bleacher Report‘s Eric Pincus (9/18/25) did:
WNBA players jumping to a roughly 50/50 revenue split with owners like the NBA isn’t realistic. WNBA operating costs are higher, and the business isn’t as mature.
That line came from an article headlined “How Much Money Can WNBA Players Realistically Expect in Next CBA Deal?” which told readers that “the various costs to run the WNBA are 3–5 times higher than those incurred by the NBA for similar services, such as staff, facilities and travel”—according to unnamed sources, as usual—and that “as the WNBA continues to grow, those costs should level out.” Pincus suggested a “practical compromise” might “gradually increase the players’ revenue share,” so that “max salaries could surpass $660,000 by 2027.”
The New York Times (10/3/25) published a useful, if rare, corrective to these sorts of claims of the impossibility of a 50/50 split, in the form of an op-ed from Berri:
The WNBA makes more money than the NBA did at the same point in its history…. Even in the 1950s, when the NBA was earning one-tenth (in 2025 dollars) what the women’s league makes today, it paid players 40% of total revenue, a startling contrast to the 7% WNBA players get.
And by the end of the ’70s, Berri noted, male players’ revenue share had reached “at least half”—at a time when NBA revenue was lower than the W’s projected revenue for 2026.
In the context of Berri’s number-crunching and historical comparisons, it’s unclear how giving women players 50% revenue share “isn’t realistic” for any reasons other than misogyny and greed.
Focus on salaries, not revenue
Bloomberg (11/7/25) unsurprisingly sides with the billionaires: “For some team owners, sharing more revenue could bite. Those who have been in control of their franchises the longest have experienced lean years that saw other teams fold—and are eager to recoup their losses.”
Profitability is not the only claim WNBA ownership made that the media took at face value. Bloomberg (11/7/25) reported:
For its part, the WNBA has proposed tripling player salaries while keeping in place an arrangement that opens up revenue-sharing if certain growth targets are reached, according to the [anonymous] people [familiar with the talks]. To date, those benchmarks have never been hit.
If you read further, you come to understand that the convoluted setup, plus the Covid shutdown, made those benchmarks impossible to hit—but also that, even if they were hit, the players would only get revenue sharing on the overage, and even then only a small fraction.
Even if…league revenue had increased by 20% every year through 2025, to the point of being nearly triple that of the league’s 2019 revenue, not a single penny would have been distributed in revenue sharing.
So when the league says “revenue-sharing” is part of its offer to players in current negotiations, reporters ought to read that with skepticism. Does it mean players get a share of all revenues—sometimes referred to as “clean” sharing—like the men? Or does it mean there’s a complicated formula that allows the league to say they’re sharing, when in fact the women will still get peanuts?
‘Exactly what the players wanted’
To Sports Illustrated (11/18/25), the WNBA’s proposal “seems like exactly what the players had wanted.” But it doesn’t seem that way to the players’ union (ESPN, 11/20/25).
In its latest offer, the league proposed a new minimum salary of $220,000, with a maximum salary of over $1.2 million. What about the main point of contention, which is the revenue-sharing structure? According to Yahoo! Sports (11/21/25), “There were scant details about the degree of revenue-sharing.” However, that did not stop sports media outlets from praising the league’s latest offer, and prematurely rejoicing at the coming end of negotiations.
AP (11/18/25) broke the news of the latest proposal, citing the usual anonymous owner-side sources:
People familiar with the WNBA’s latest proposal described the plan to the AP as a highly lucrative package providing substantial increases over prior years and designed to bring negotiations to a quick conclusion.
Though the union has been abundantly clear about their desire to change the revenue structure, the message has somehow not gotten through to the media. Sports Illustrated’s Grant Young (11/18/25) wrote that “this report seems like exactly what the players had wanted with the new CBA.” Forbes (11/19/25) made a similar claim, asserting that “if settled, one of the main demands from the players party will have been met.”
Fox’s Outkick (11/20/25) reported that the league’s new offer
includes a massive raise along with additional benefits. And by massive raise, we mean three to four times the previous salaries. But despite the eye-popping monetary figures, it’s unclear whether the players’ union is finally satisfied.
Sports Illustrated (11/18/25) also focused on the salary increase: “That’s also about a 400% increase in salary from the CBA before this year, which one would imagine players are happy about.”
The job of journalists is not to “imagine” what a crucial stakeholder in these negotiations may feel; it is to ask them for their reaction, something which AP, Forbes, Outkick and Sports Illustrated all failed to do.
Some cursory reporting would reveal that this is far from “exactly what the players wanted.” As WNBPA president Nneka Oguwmike (CBS Sports, 10/21/24) said last year, “Opting out isn’t just about bigger paychecks—it’s about claiming our rightful share of the business we’ve built.” Indeed, the players’ union said the new offer does not meet their central demands (ESPN, 11/20/25).
Yet media outlets have repeatedly decided to focus on the monetary amount of salary increases, rather than the percentages compared to the league’s revenue. In October, when the WNBA announced an offer, the Athletic (10/24/25) reported that both the WNBA’s and the players union’s “plans include a substantial salary increase for players.” Front Office Sports (10/28/25) also used the word “substantial” to describe the league’s proposal, while Disney‘s ESPN (10/30/25) chose to call them “sizable.”
The WNBA’s proposed salary increases might appear to be “substantial” compared to the salaries in the current CBA. However, these media outlets fail to note how abysmal the current salaries are compared to the league’s revenue. For example, according to Berri, 2024 Rookie of the Year Caitlin Clark could have made around $3 million during her first season, had revenue-sharing been implemented. Instead, she made just $76,535 (New York Times, 10/3/25), and the newest “lucrative” increase would give her a little more than $300,000.
Plain old misogyny
David Samson (Pablo Torre Finds Out, 10/28/25): “What the women want in the WNBA is for the WNBA to do a deal that would guarantee no profitability.”
Most bad faith arguments against a revenue-sharing model for the WNBA can be summarized by a statement made by David Samson on the popular investigative sports journalism podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out (10/28/25), which is distributed by the Athletic:
What kind of an idiot would sign a deal that guarantees lack of profitability? You literally have to be out of your mind. What the women want in the WNBA is for the WNBA to do a deal that would guarantee no profitability. They’re not going to do it.
And I would call the bluff of all these negotiators, of all the women who are talking about “We want the same percentage of the revenue as the NBA players get.”… There is zero chance that the women in the WNBA are going to get the same percentage of revenue that the NBA players get.
Samson, a frequent guest on the podcast, is the former owner of the Major League Baseball’s Miami Marlins, so he’s clearly coming from an owner’s perspective. Aside from the false profitability claims that we have already debunked, the language Samson uses to talk about the WNBA is particularly interesting. In those four sentences, Sampson says the word “women” three times, in case listeners were unaware what the W in WNBA stands for.
Meanwhile, when he references male athletes, he refers to them as “players.” The implication, whether purposeful or not, is that NBA players get to be athletes first, while WNBA players’ most significant characteristic is their gender.
Torre did not make any attempt to counter Samson’s statement.
The misogyny at the heart of the gender wage gap runs deep. Where sports reporting should be illuminating and challenging that misogyny and holding the powerful owners to account, much of it instead only adds to the discrimination WNBA players face.
Opening ceremony for COP30 in Belem, Brazil (photo: Palácio do Planalto)
This week on CounterSpin: US media didn’t exactly mince words: “Climate Summit Viewed as Flop by Many” was the headline the LA Times put on an AP report. The subhead explained: “The COP30 talks held in Belem, Brazil, end without a timeline for reducing fossil fuels.” The future of climate disruption, if not pulled off course, is devastating, but the present is bad enough, if you are placed, or inclined, to see it. So how could a global climate conference that doesn’t put demands on fossil fuel producers at the center be anything but a flop?
The answer is not to absolve COP30 or polluting countries, much less industries, of their responsibility. But focusing some conversation on what people, including those most harmed, are doing, along with what’s being done to them, could help move debate off an outdated dime—onto the kind of work that stands a chance of helping us all.
Joe Torres (Free Press, 5/27/21): “As Tulsa observes the 100th anniversary of the massacre, it’s crucial that we remember the role the city’s newspapers played in weaponizing anti-Black narratives.”
The New York Times (11/24/25), Washington Post (12/24/25), CBS News (11/24/25), USA Today (11/24/25)—seems as though everyone had space to acknowledge the passing, at age 111, of Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest known survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
That’s when 300 overwhelmingly Black women, men and children were murdered, their killings sparked by a sensationalized front-page article in the local Tulsa Tribune (5/31/1921) about a 19-year-old Black shoeshiner, Dick Rowland, falsely accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white girl. A white mob destroyed businesses, churches, doctor’s offices and groceries in Greenwood, a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street or Little Africa, along with the homes of more than 10,000 Black Tulsans.
As Joe Torres (Free Press, 5/27/21), co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, recounted, the local white-owned press didn’t just fuel the massacre; it also helped cover it up. The other main local paper, the Tulsa World, provided the white narrative of the massacre in its headline (6/1/1921) the next day: “Two Whites Dead in Race Riot.”
The World (6/15/1921) explained the situation by quoting Tulsa Mayor T.D. Evans:
Let the blame for this Negro uprising lie right where it belongs—on those armed Negros and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it. And any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong, and should be told so in no uncertain language.
The newspaper (6/4/1921) called on “the innocent, hardworking colored element of Tulsa” to “cooperate fully and with vast enthusiasm” with officials, and “band themselves together for their own protection against this element of non-working, worthless Negros.” (The World is still published today, and is Oklahoma’s second-biggest paper.)
The right-wing New York Post (11/24/25) was one of the few outlets writing about Viola Fletcher that remembered the press’s role in the massacre: “She was only 7 years old when a white mob stormed Tulsa’s prosperous, largely Black Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman.”
The Tribune (6/5/1921), in an editorial replete with racial epithets, likewise blamed Black residents. It urged against the rebuilding of the neighborhood:
The bad elements among the negroes, long plotting and planning and collecting guns and ammunition, brought this upon Tulsa just as the winds gather into a cyclone and sweep upon a city. This bad element among the negroes must learn this is not a city of, for and by their kind. NEVER.
Torres reflected:
No one was ever held responsible for the murders committed during the massacre, or for the destruction of Greenwood. Instead, public and private institutions in Tulsa tried to erase the massacre from public consciousness. The Tribune didn’t even mention the massacre in its paper until 1971.
In its obituary, the New York Times (11/24/25) was moved to poignantly recall how “Viola never received more than an elementary school education. Instead, she worked alongside her relatives as a sharecropper, picking cotton and tending to livestock for $1 a day.” But still, to this day, they and others have no room at all for serious examination of the role of the press in the racist nightmare that shaped her life—much less for any discussion of what they’re doing to prevent such a nightmare’s recurrence—beyond, that is, preparing sad obituaries for the victims.
New York Times (11/16/25): “In those days, print newspapers and magazines still held sway, and Mr. Epstein had close ties to many key players in the news media and adjacent industries.”
The late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is best known for having been accused of operating a sex-trafficking ring that supplied elite men with girls as young as 14. Epstein and his associates are believed to have abused hundreds of women and girls on Little Saint James, a private island Epstein owned from 1998 until his death in 2019. But in the New York Times’ telling, it’s not the girls on Epstein’s island but rather President Donald Trump—an Epstein associate many suspect of having participated in the alleged abuse—who is being “held captive” by a “news cycle he can’t avoid or defeat” (New York Times, 11/18/25).
In reporting on Epstein and those in his orbit, the Times has frequently focused on the men and the supposedly bygone era in which they committed their crimes with impunity. “Epstein Emails Reveal a Lost New York,” read one such headline—later changed to “Epstein Emails Reveal a Bygone Elite”—above a story (11/16/25) that expressed nostalgia for “a clubby world that is all but gone.”
Epstein’s emails, reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote, are “like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene.” Epstein’s inbox, he added, was “larded with boldface names…that once meant everything to status-obsessed New Yorkers.” These emails, which stretched back decades, “show how that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.”
‘They are not mass rapists’
David Brooks (New York Times, 11/21/25) suggests a message for Democratic politicians: “No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks seemed to want to bring back that protected realm, calling for less talk about Epstein’s documented ties to members of the global elite, up to and including the president of the United States. Under the headline “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out” (11/21/25), Brooks suggested that caring about Epstein’s ties to elite figures is the province of conspiracy nuts and social media mobs. “Say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites,” Brooks wrote, “but they are not mass rapists.”
The only other reference to girls, women or rape comes in the form of a quote he included from Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna: “I realized how much the abuse by rich and powerful men of young girls and the sense of a rape island that Epstein had set up for people embodied the corruption of government.”
Brooks thinks this is silly, and that Khanna’s use of the phrase “the Epstein class” is “inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible.” He cautioned against leaping to the conclusion that Epstein was “a typical member of the American establishment,” rather than an “outlier.”
As a female Times reader wrote of Brooks’ column in a letter to the editor (11/24/25), there is “not one word of sympathy for or concern…in Mr. Brooks’s 1,200-word piece” for Epstein’s “largely anonymous and helpless teenage victims.”
To Brooks, it’s elite figures, and even Epstein himself, who are the real victims: After all, far-right commentator Candace Owens sees Epstein not just as a “rancid man,” but “a scheming Jew working on behalf of Israel to control assets via blackmail.”
‘Lying low, at least for a while’
New York Times (11/20/25) quotes economist Brad DeLong: “Larry will continue to have worthwhile thoughts.”
A similar worry about excess Epstein talk seemed to suffuse a recent Times news article (11/20/25) on Epstein associate Larry Summers, a former Harvard president and Clinton era Treasury Secretary. “Lawrence Summers Came Back From Scandals. Will Epstein Emails Prevent That?” read the headline. The subhead characterized evidence of predatory behavior as another potentially survivable controversy: “The former Harvard president has come back from controversy before, but revelations in new Epstein emails are threatening his omnipresence in public life.”
From this article, we learn that Summers has held many “prominent roles,” has long been an “omnipresent public intellectual,” is “one of the country’s best-known economists,” has held positions on “prominent boards,” and is part of
a vast group of powerful men who have faced seemingly career-threatening scandals over comments or actions related to their treatment of women, and yet have maintained a place in public life.
This status is now in jeopardy, thanks to the Epstein emails, which merely revealed Summers’ “chumminess with a notorious sex offender.” The Times even helpfully paraphrased the recommendations of a crisis and reputation management specialist for men in Summers’ position: “lying low, at least for a while, and doing selfless work, such as philanthropy.”
The Times is not the only publication more concerned with the problems of the powerful than the circumstances of their victims. In a story headlined, “After decades of power, Washington shuns Larry Summers over Epstein ties,” the Washington Post (11/21/25) reported that Summers, who “dominated economic thought, on both sides of the aisle, for the better part of four decades,” is now persona non grata in Washington because he corresponded with Epstein for years and sought advice about an attempt to “court” a woman nearly 30 years his junior. All we learn about the woman Summers was attempting to “court” is that she was decades younger and a fellow economist.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Food Research and Action Center’s Crystal FitzSimons about cuts to SNAP for the November 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In 1997, corporate news media were feeling good. A program they had vigorously championed—it was called “welfare reform”—was in the books. “The debate is over,” then-President Bill Clinton announced. “We now know that welfare reform works.”
Neil deMause reported it for FAIR, noting, among many examples, Newsweek’sdeclaration that one year in, the Personal Responsibility Act that abolished federal guarantees of aid to struggling people “blows the doors off even the most optimistic predictions.” At the Cleveland Plain Dealer, it was, “Despite the Chicken Little warnings, welfare reform has been a success.”
Now, the foundation for this excitement was a White House report saying that the welfare rolls had dropped by 1.4 million people between August 1996 and May 1997. Clinton advisor Bruce Reed told the Houston Chronicle that that 12% decrease was “totally unprecedented in the history of welfare.”
What Reed didn’t answer, because he wasn’t asked, was: Where did those people go? Did they get jobs, or did they just get so frustrated by new requirements that they stopped applying for aid? Did localities cut their caseload figures by ignoring the long-acknowledged “churning,” wherein people are kicked off for missing an appointment, and then have to reapply?
The Dallas Morning News declared that “researchers have found no evidence of widespread suffering.” But they later admitted that in Wisconsin, which implemented welfare restrictions sooner than any other state in the nation, homeless shelters were reporting increased demand for aid, and that most states didn’t even study what had happened to those who had lost aid. The Dallas Morning News had a sole source: so-called “conservative welfare scholar” Lawrence Mead, who said “there has been no widespread suffering. If there had been, we’d surely have heard about it.”
All of which brings us to November 2025. Now, as then, we are hearing about policy more from its makers than from those whose lives are shaped by it. We continue to endure so-called debate about whether or not some people deserve to buy their children cupcakes. After all of this time, we still have a public conversation that is myth-informed more than informed by data or, in many cases, human decency.
Joining us now to talk through all of this is Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Crystal FitzSimons.
Crystal FitzSimons: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me today.
JJ: We’re going to pull back to a wider view in a second, but let’s start with the right now. We’re hearing that SNAP and food benefits are being reinstated, now that the government is open again. But that doesn’t really convey the situation properly, does it? I mean, how would you describe the situation of SNAP, and cuts to SNAP, right at the moment?
CF: Last week, the government shutdown ended, and the US Department of Agriculture for the first time, during this shutdown, actually stopped SNAP benefits from going out to families. It was completely unprecedented. So for about 13 days, families were really struggling to figure out how to put food on the table. The administration actually went to court, to appeals court, and then to the Supreme Court, to stop a judge’s ruling that they would have to provide these benefits to the families who are eligible for them. And so people are recovering from that.
But, as you mentioned, there were historic, unprecedented cuts made to the SNAP program last summer, through the budget reconciliation bill, and those are starting to be felt as well.
JJ: So even reopening the government doesn’t mean that these cuts will be reinstated, and HR1 suggests that there are more permanent cuts going forward.
CF: Correct. And, as you mentioned, with welfare reform, one of the requirements was around work. SNAP has always had some work requirements, as part of welfare reform. So there were some work requirements that were placed on receiving SNAP for able-bodied adults without dependents. But there have always been significant exceptions.
And at FRAC, we believe that food is a human right, that everybody should be able to access the SNAP program who is eligible, and that work requirements really do not increase long-term employment. The research definitely does not support that. What it really does is increase poverty and hunger.
JJ: I want to draw you out on that because, while I wish I didn’t need to do this, and, frankly, if news media did their job, I wouldn’t need to do it. But there are many media templates that are harmfully distorted. And one of them is, even in an article that might wind up being somehow sympathetic, there still is this framework of “workers versus SNAP recipients.” And you can’t really have a conversation if you don’t understand that these are not different groups.
CF: That’s absolutely right. So when you think about SNAP, we have 42 million people in this country who participate in SNAP. Close to 14 million of them are children. And then a number of them are older adults, people with disabilities. We have over a million people on SNAP who are veterans, who served the country. And then there were also waivers that states and communities could get if there was high unemployment in the area.
So if you’re covered by these time limits, how it translates is that you get three months of benefits for three years. So you are really out of luck.
And the work requirements are not just about work, it’s 20 hours a week. It really is about making sure that you’re able to document and prove that you’re working. And so we expect people who are meeting the requirements to fall out as well.
JJ: I think a lot of folks think, “Well, if folks just tried harder, if folks just would be better, if they would just try harder to get a job.” I wonder, if you’re just talking to that person, in an elevator, as they say, and you’ve got a few minutes to talk to them, and they say, “I work. I don’t understand why any dollar that I work for should be given to someone who doesn’t work.” How do you break it down for people? I mean, how do you break it down, even for people who just don’t think they should care about somebody else, in general?
CF: There’s a couple of things that I would say. First is, if somebody’s looking for a job, it is very hard to do anything when you’re hungry. And so if we want to encourage people to be able to be productive in our workforce, we need to make sure that people are not going hungry.
So you have people who participate in SNAP you would not expect to work. You’ve got kids, you’ve got parents with young children, you’ve got seniors, you have people with disabilities.
But it also is a work support. So some people do work, and they receive SNAP to help augment their salaries and wages because they are so low.
JJ: I’m frustrated, frankly, by the way media center the conversation around, “Should somebody be able to buy soda? That doesn’t seem healthy and, uh….” It’s frustrating to narrow the conversation down in that way, because, as FRAC’s work lifts up, this is so beyond individuals who need food assistance. This is about small-town stores, it’s about farms, it’s about local economies, it’s about healthcare. So many things are in play here, and when media tell people this is about “them” and it’s not about “you,” that’s a real misdirection, right? Because there are a lot of ripple effects of cuts to SNAP that people maybe don’t know about.
CF: Right. And I would also say that a lot of our neighbors are participating in SNAP; one in eight households across the country participate in SNAP. SNAP supports the families who participate in the program, but also, as you point out, has a huge economic impact throughout the nation. And so for every dollar that’s spent in SNAP, it generates up to a $1.80 in economic activity. And that supports local jobs and local businesses. It supports local grocers.
Some of these cuts that they’re proposing with SNAP, we’re very, very concerned what it’s going to mean for rural grocers, and for grocery stores in general, because SNAP is a huge support to lots of rural grocery stores. In some communities, there is just one grocery store, and SNAP benefits could cover 20% of the purchases that are taking place in that store. And grocery stores are on a very tight margin, and losing SNAP benefits could really cause them not to be able to survive.
JJ: You mentioned people with disabilities, and I always like to lift that up. I’m looking at a piece from Sara Luterman at the 19th, talking about how those living in a household with at least one disabled person experience rates of food insecurity about double those without. And I’m not sure that people understand that food insecurity is about the household, and not just the individual.
So there’s a way to think about this that we’re not encouraged to think about it, but if you could just see the picture a little clearer, you would understand that if the supposedly load-bearing adult has a disability, that that might affect the entire household’s ability to provide for themselves. It’s just a more holistic picture than we are often told.
CF: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It is outrageous that people with disabilities are more at risk for poverty and hunger, and we should be doing more to protect both the person experiencing the disability, and then the entire household.
JJ: And the idea that, like, “Well, just get a job”—we should be so beyond that. “Obviously you wouldn’t need public assistance if you would just get a job.” It’s such a misinformed conversation.
Crystal FitzSimons: “The problem isn’t that we have 42 million people on SNAP. The problem is that we have 42 million people who live in poverty.”
CF: Yeah, I mean, it’s outrageous. So we have 42 million people in this country who participate in SNAP, and the problem isn’t that we have 42 million people on SNAP. The problem is that we have 42 million people who live in poverty. We do not have wages that are high enough to support all of our workers and move them out of poverty. And we have too many kids who are growing up in poverty, and all the negative impacts that that has on their ability to thrive as they grow.
JJ: What was the substance and the import of the letter that FRAC, along with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and then, I know, more than a thousand other national, state and local groups, just sent to Congress. What were you trying to say with that letter, and what do you hope might come from it?
CF: Yeah, well, we are really excited about a bill that was introduced today, the Restoring Food Security for American Families and Farmers Act. And that would reverse the cuts that were made through the budget reconciliation law last summer. And we think that’s critical. We think that we need to reverse course, we need to recommit to building a nation free from hunger, and this bill would reverse those cuts that were made to SNAP last summer.
JJ: Tell us a little bit more about that, because I think we’re seeing folks look to states and local communities for meaningful action. Does that seem like moving the locus might be important?
CF: Well, so, a couple of things. For every nine meals that SNAP provides, charitable food provides one. So charitable food is an important part of making sure that people do not go hungry in this country, but SNAP cannot be replaced by states or localities.
But what the bill did was, it shifted the federal responsibility for SNAP to states by creating new cost shares. So in some states, states are going to be required to cover a portion of SNAP benefits if their error rates are too high, and most states are covered by this. And so they’re scrambling to figure out how they would be able to provide state resources to cover those benefits. And we are very, very worried that some states may end up dropping out of the program, which would mean that everyone in the state would lose access to SNAP.
So right now, states are looking at how to cover the additional costs that are being transferred to them. They’re also facing increased administrative costs. Historically, the administrative costs of running SNAP at the state level have been shared by the federal government with a 50/50 split, and they shifted it so that states would have to cover 75% of those costs, at the same time when they’re making the program more complicated to operate. So they’re increasing the administrative costs of running the program, and then also shifting those costs back to the state. So it’s incredibly problematic.
That’s the first thing that’s going to kick in as far as the state share, is the increase in the administrative costs. And that would happen October 1, 2026. And so now is when states are thinking about their budget, and figuring out how to meet those costs.
JJ: And that’s where I want to ask you to talk about state-level media, local-level media, because this is going to land on them like an alien from outer space. Suddenly these new costs, these new concerns, these new budget pressures, and I don’t want journalists to act as though it’s coming from nowhere. I wonder what you would see as the best possible journalistic response, as these responsibilities land on states, and these new budget concerns land on states. What would you ask journalists to be asking about, refuting? What would you like to see from media on this?
CF: Yeah, well, I think it’s going to be really important for media to dig into the impact that SNAP has, and how important it is for people within their state. So taking a look at who’s participating in the program, and how important it is, and really telling the story about the importance of SNAP.
What happened with the government shutdown was heartbreaking, but I think it really did elevate how important SNAP is. And I do think, across the country, people have a better understanding of how many people are vulnerable to hunger and poverty, and how important the federal response is. And so even if states are going to have to spend some more money to cover and operate SNAP, that program is critical to making sure that people in their state are able to put food on the table.
So the hope is that people will really take a look at it, and that all the understanding that people have gained, including the media, over the last three weeks, will translate into a story about this. But it is going to be really tough for states if Congress doesn’t reverse the state cost share on benefits and administrative costs, because states are either going to have to make really difficult decisions, cutting their budget to pay for additional SNAP costs, increasing taxes. Most states do not have a reserve fund that is going to cover this.
JJ: And we want to bring it all back to people. It’s just people who want to put food on the table. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a partisan question. It’s a question of whether or not we want people to go to bed hungry.
CF: That’s absolutely right. I mean, we have historically had a commitment to make sure that people were not going hungry in this country. SNAP is a core part of that. It is our largest and most effective anti-hunger program. It improves health, it lifts people out of poverty. And then we also have school meals and summer food and summer EBT and childcare food, and all these programs that make sure that kids have access to the food they need at home and at school, or at childcare or at summer programs or afterschool programs. And that has always had a bipartisan commitment.
I do think that most people in the United States do not want their neighbors to be going hungry. And now is the time that we really need to reverse the course that we’re on, where we’re making dramatic cuts and changes to our federal nutrition safety net.
JJ: Alright then, I’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Crystal FitzSimons. She’s president of the Food Research and Action Center. You can follow their work online at FRAC.org. Thank you so much, Crystal FitzSimons, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson reaired archival interviews with Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz about housing and media for the November 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multiracial democracy, and we’ve talked about that a lot on the show. Today we will revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz. Housing and the media: This week on CounterSpin.
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Home ownership is a key ingredient in what is still called the “American Dream.” Beyond the meaningful symbolism of having one’s own patch, home ownership is instrumental in wealth creation. It’s the difference between living paycheck to paycheck and being able to think about the future, and maybe hand something off to your children.
That’s why many people are looking with worry at the phenomenon of institutional investors, meaning Wall Street, gobbling up a larger and larger percentage of homes, and particularly entry-level homes, the very ones that first-home buyers would be looking at as affordable. We talked about this with longtime housing advocate Gene Slater, chairman and founder of CSG Advisors. This is us with Gene Slater a couple years back:
Gene Slater: Traditionally, there have been many, tens of millions of ma-and-pa small landlords. But the idea of Wall Street, with virtually unlimited access to cash, buying up single-family homes is a recent phenomenon.
It started in 2010, after the financial crisis, in part encouraged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who financed some of these entities to buy up homes.
And then it remained, and it sort of fell back, and was at a modest level. And the last couple of years, toward the end of the pandemic, it’s really mushroomed significantly.
And I think that’s for two reasons. One, from the Wall Street point of view—and I’m talking about REITs, particularly general partnerships—they had raised tremendous amounts of capital before the pandemic to invest in real estate, and suddenly, in the pandemic, one wasn’t going to invest in shopping centers or retail or in office buildings.
So a lot of that got focused on either just buying normal rental properties, standard apartment buildings, but also got focused on buying single-family homes, because they saw single-family homes going up, becoming less affordable, and they could buy. And their focus was in buying in less-expensive neighborhoods, more affordable parts of the country.
And so they saw this as an opportunity to make long-term gains and to push up rents. And they did algorithms showing, we could add rent charges for this…. Unlike ma-and-pa landlords, they could basically create standardized ways of doing this.
So they’ve seen this as a big opportunity. And the more inflation has heated up, the more they’re now pitching this to their investors as, “This is a perfect hedge against inflation.”
JJ: This has also huge racial ramifications as well, yeah?
GS: Yeah. In fact, part of the way I approached this problem is, I had just written a book last year, Freedom to Discriminate, on how the realtors conspired to segregate housing and divide the country. And as I’ve been talking about that in different places, this issue has come up in those discussions, in places I didn’t expect. Talking about this in Greensboro, North Carolina, and basically turned a community meeting about gentrification in East Greensboro into one of out-of-town investors buying homes.
So it’s happening there. It’s happening virtually everywhere. It’s not only in minority areas; it’s not necessarily deliberately targeted, but it’s targeted, buying homes on average 26% below the statewide average.
So that means a focus on startup homes, on modest homes, many of which have been in minority areas. So it’s having an outsized impact.
There’s an excellent Federal Reserve of Minneapolis study, mapping where these corporate landlords are buying, and you can see tremendous overlap with areas where minorities live or would normally buy.
JJ: You also note—and you just tilted towards this, but it might need spelling out—with fewer families able to buy homes, those people stay renting, and so landlords can then push up rents as well. It’s kind of a self-feeding cycle.
Gene Slater: “The starter homes, the modest-cost homes, families can’t even bid on them, because they’ve been swooped up in all-cash, no-inspection offers that no family can compete with.”
GS: Yeah. Those people remain renters, and they’re at the top end of the rental market, so it allows landlords to push up rents in general. And these corporate landlords are pace-setting, and very explicitly they’re deciding, “Well, the median income of our tenants is this; we can push to a higher percentage of disposable income.” That’s what’s happening.
And the impact is of reducing the number of homes that families can buy. This is what’s really key. There’s a record-low level of how many homes are available for purchase, because people are staying in their homes longer, because they’re affected by being able to find another place.
And with that record-low inventory—this happened especially during the pandemic—there’s a pressure to push up prices. If you remove a lot of the starter homes, the modest-cost homes, families can’t even bid on them, because they’ve been swooped up in all-cash, no-inspection offers that no family can compete with. They’re bidding against each other for a smaller and smaller share of homes. That’s pushing up prices, and that’s pushing up rents.
JJ: And then also, ownership means power, so it matters, in terms of policy, that this market is now one where Wall Street is invested, and is going to be trying to call the shots. Who owns the homes in a neighborhood has an effect on policy in that neighborhood. And it’s just another element that this is affecting, right?
GS: Yes, absolutely. And it also has an effect on neighborhood stability, especially single-family neighborhoods that have been largely ownership, or significantly ownership, to remove the opportunities for ownership makes those into less stable neighborhoods.
It’s a long-term effect on home ownership in the country, and it’s really asking, “Who do we want to own America? Who do we want to own our neighborhoods?”
***
Janine Jackson: Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its Black population. So says researcher and author Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute in an essay from May of 2015 on the roots of protests around the killing of Freddie Gray. We talked with him about all of those interconnected issues.
Richard Rothstein: “Segregation was a government policy, it was racially conscious, it was not the unintended consequence of benign policies.”
Richard Rothstein: We have a myth in this country that we have what the lawyers call de facto segregation, that we created these neighborhoods—like the inner city of Baltimore, that are almost all Black, that are poor, segregated from mainstream society—by accident, either because Black people were too poor to move to the suburbs, or because there was private prejudice, or because it was white flight of people who didn’t want to live near Blacks.
And although some of that is true, the bigger cause, the most important cause of segregation is public policy that was deliberately intended, for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, to separate Black and white families. And segregation was a government policy, it was racially conscious, it was not the unintended consequence of benign policies. It was designed by federal, state and local governments to segregate our communities. This is true in every metropolitan area in the country.
Now in Baltimore, in the early 20th century, Baltimore actually passed an ordinance defining which blocks Blacks could live on and which blocks whites could live on. When that kind of ordinance was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917, the mayor of Baltimore set up a committee on segregation to make sure that even without the ordinance still being in effect, that housing inspectors and health inspectors would enforce segregation, and if any family in a white neighborhood were to sell to a Black family, the housing inspectors and health inspectors would make sure that the Black family could no longer live there. And this kind of thing went on at the local level for many years.
Then the federal government played a major role in explicitly segregating neighborhoods in Baltimore and throughout the country. The first civilian public housing program began in a deal under the Public Works Administration; it was a New Deal program to create housing for civilian populations, and it was segregated. The director of the Public Works Administration in the Franklin Roosevelt administration established what he called a neighborhood composition rule, which was that public housing could only be established for people of the race in the neighborhood where the public housing was established.
In fact, many of the public housing projects were established in integrated neighborhoods; they tore down integrated neighborhoods and created segregated neighborhoods in their place. That’s one of the things that happened in St. Louis, for example, that led to the kind of situation we have in Ferguson.
That continued; public housing continued to be segregated throughout the 20th century up until the mid-1950s. In 1949, President Truman proposed a massive expansion of public housing programs in this country; at the time, there was still a civilian housing shortage, so public housing was for whites, not just for Blacks. And in order to try and defeat his public housing proposal, Republicans in Congress put forward what they called the “poison pill amendment.” That was an amendment that would require public housing to be integrated—knowing that if the amendment passed, Southern Democrats would no longer vote for public housing, and the entire public housing program would be defeated.
So liberal Democrats in the Senate and the House, led by people like Hubert Humphrey, campaigned against the integration amendment, because they argued that if the public housing was integrated, there would be no public housing at all.
And this was true throughout the country; this was not just for the South. So segregated public housing was created throughout the country.
The biggest federal policy probably was the policy of the Federal Housing Administration, which financed, starting in the early 1940s, builders of subdivisions, mass-production builders of places like, if you’re familiar with, Levittown, New York, or Daly City in California, and subdivisions everywhere in between. They financed builders to create subdivisions of single-family homes in the suburbs on condition that they be sold to whites only. That was an explicit condition of the Federal Housing Administration financing of bank loans to developers.
So while whites and Blacks who were of similar incomes, returning war veterans for example, working-class families, could have afforded to buy into the suburbs, only whites were permitted to do so. Blacks were consigned not only to urban ghettos, but to segregated public housing in urban ghettos.
And those are the kinds of policies that resulted in what we see in Baltimore today, what we see in St. Louis, and what we see around the country in the last 50 years.
One more thing: In 1970, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Nixon administration was a fellow named George Romney, the father of the recent presidential candidate. George Romney understood everything I’ve just described to you—as did most people at that time; we’ve forgotten this history. George Romney said that the federal government created a “white noose” around inner-city ghettos, and it was the job of the federal government now to untie that noose, and George Romney began a program which he called “open communities,” in which he denied federal funds to suburbs that refused to desegregate.
And one of the first test cases he made of this policy of denying federal funds for sewers and parkland and water projects was Baltimore County. He told Baltimore County that it was not going to get any more federal funds for any urban projects unless it repealed its exclusionary zoning ordinance, the ordinance that prohibited the construction of multi-family dwellings in the suburbs, unless it accepted public housing with African-Americans, and unless it accepted subsidized low-income housing. Baltimore County was one of the first places that he tried to do that.
Eventually George Romney was reined in by the Nixon administration, because there was a white backlash to his desegregation policies, and Romney himself was eventually forced out as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and we’ve had nothing as aggressive in the way of desegregation since.
So this history was once well-known; it was once widely accepted and understood that segregation was not an accident, but it was a purposeful creation of state, federal and local government, and we’ve now forgotten it, and we think it happened by accident. And when we think it happened by accident, we then think there is nothing we can do about it. Whereas if we understood that this was the product of government policy, we would understand that there are government policies that could reverse it.
***
Janine Jackson: For many people, and for media, the idea of racial discrimination in housing invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A book by our guest illuminated the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live. The book was called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. We spoke with its author, George Lipsitz.
George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”
George Lipsitz: Housing discrimination raises in people’s minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on people’s life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.
I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home-value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.
Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.
It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.
And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.
Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms; the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.
I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.
So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.
JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?
GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrianaccidents. The street lighting is worse.
People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.
Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.
Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get unnutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.
JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.
For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American Dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.
GL: These impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.
Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.
But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.
***
Janine Jackson: That was George Lipsitz, speaking with CounterSpin last fall. Before that you heard Richard Rothstein, and Gene Slater.
This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media have vilified people who use public assistance, and lied about why they need it, almost like it’s their job. Today is nothing new. But here’s a fun fact, as noted by Michael Klinski from South Dakota News Watch: Ziebach County has the sixth-highest percentage of residents who receive SNAP benefits in the country, at 43.5%, and doesn’t have a single retailer that accepts food stamps.
What if SNAP weren’t a story about major political party back-and-forthing, and were instead a story about people who need food? So they can go to their job? And feed their children so they can go to school? Wouldn’t that be something? What if that were the story?
“AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring,” Bloomberg (9/29/25) reported—but that’s not the story the Washington Post wants to tell.
US electricity prices, you may have noticed, keep going up. And in some parts of the country, like here in the DC region, they’re soaring. In Virginia, for example, electricity rates are up 13% this year, an issue Democrats highlighted as they swept back into power in Richmond earlier this month.
Burgeoning electric bills also factored into Democrats’ November wins in New Jersey and Georgia. But let’s stick with Virginia for a moment, where energy-sucking data centers are so plentiful that if northern Virginia’s DC suburbs were to secede, the new country would have more data center capacity than China.
As a result of these data centers, this new country would likely suffer from crippling electric bills. “Wholesale electricity [now] costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers,” read a recent Bloomberg subhead.
The Bloomberg story (9/29/25)—headlined “AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring”—begins:
Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills. The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’”
Brewing outrage
Heatmap (11/6/25): “The techlash over data center development is becoming a potent political force that could shape elections for generations.”
If ever there was a story ripe for sustained coverage from the DC region’s paper of record, this is it. In the Washington Post’s own backyard, ratepayers like Stanley are being bilked out of billions of dollars to pay for electrical grid upgrades that disproportionately benefit trillion-dollar companies seeking to win the AI race by powering up their ever-expanding fleet of data centers.
Northern Virginia’s unmatched density of data centers has made it the backbone of the internet, through which 70% of global internet traffic flows. (Northern Virginia also happens to be home to the Pentagon and CIA.)
The upward transfer of wealth—from ratepayers to Big Tech—isn’t just happening in the DC region, but nationwide. And it has triggered an uprising that spans the country and crosses political boundaries.
“Nearly every week now across the US, from arid Tucson, Arizona, to the suburban sprawl of the DC area, Americans are protesting, rejecting, restricting or banning new data center development,” Heatmap (11/6/25) reported.
This month’s elections—in which ties to data centers were an albatross for Republican incumbents with ties to the data center industry—showed this.
But readers get little sense of the brewing outrage from the pages of the WashingtonPost—which just happens to be owned by the founder of Amazon, a company at the forefront of the data center buildout, with plans on doubling its capacity by 2027.
The Washington Post’s coverage isn’t just weak, it also often fails the most basic journalistic test by not disclosing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ ties to the company he founded three decades ago.
While Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, he remains the company’s executive chairman and its largest shareholder, with stock estimated to be worth over $200 billion. (Bezos purchased the Post in 2013 for $250 million, which is less than 1% of his Amazon holdings.)
And AI data centers are key to Amazon’s success. Meanwhile Bezos’s personal stake in AI extends even further, having invested in multiple AI companies, including the startup Project Prometheus, where Bezos recently named himself co-CEO after providing part of the company’s $6.2 billion in initial funding.
The sums of money being thrown at AI are eye-popping, and nerve-wracking. Citing analysts at Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street Journal (11/16/25) reported: “Big tech companies are expected to spend nearly $3 trillion on AI through 2028 but only generate enough cash to cover half that tab.”
‘Not showing their connections’
The Washington Post (10/15/25) paints a voter as jumping to conclusions for saying that data centers should pay for the new electrical infrastructure they need: “Studies reach conflicting conclusions over the role of those data centers in everyone else’s rates…. But [Maureen] Harrison has made up her mind.”
Ahead of this month’s elections, a Washington Post story (10/15/25) questioned whether data centers were raising electricity costs. “Studies reach conflicting conclusions,” the Post reported, adding, “the experts are hardly bringing voters clarity.” (The Virginia state study that the piece pointed to as defending the data center industry was quite clear that “data centers’ increased energy demand will likely increase system costs for all customers.”) The story didn’t name Bezos or Amazon (except in the photo captions).
That same day, a Post editorial (10/15/25) called the US military’s planned new generation of smaller nuclear reactors an “excellent idea…that can’t come fast enough.” Once again, neither Bezos or Amazon were named—even though, as David Folkenflik of NPR (10/28/25) reported:
A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.
The Post editorial page’s willingness to name Bezos and Amazon has “changed,” according to Miranda Spivack, a former Post reporter. Increasingly, “they’re not showing their connections to Amazon, and yet they’re opining on issues that directly effect Amazon,” Spivack told FAIR.
Well-trodden path
Instead of the hundreds of data centers its boss’s company is building, the Washington Post (10/25/25) suggested you should instead blame “policies aimed at boosting clean energy.”
Last month, the headline of another Washington Post story (10/25/25) blared: “There’s a Reason Electricity Prices Are Rising. And It’s Not Data Centers.” The catchy story begins, “Over the past few months, Americans have looked aghast at their rising electricity bills…and found one clear scapegoat: data centers.” Once again, the Post omitted mention of Bezos and Amazon.
The story insisted that “more electricity demand can actually lower prices”—which is true, as long as your electrical system has excess capacity to meet the new demand. Once new infrastructure has to be built to accommodate demand, however, costs will rise—and that cost will be split between homeowners and other existing users, as well as the data centers.
A week later, a Post editorial (10/31/25)—headlined “New Jersey’s Next Governor Misunderstands Energy Prices”—scolded Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, for calling for a one-year “freeze” on New Jersey utility rates, which have jumped an incredible 22% since last year. “It’s unclear,” wrote the Post, “why politicians would be better at running a business than the people who currently do it.” (New Jersey voters apparently felt differently, delivering Sherrill a landslide 14-point win.)
“Forcing lower prices could mean delaying needed upgrades to energy infrastructure,” the Post continued, once again failing to mention either its owner or Amazon, which have a vested interest in ensuring costly upgrades are shouldered by New Jersey ratepayers, not tech behemoths like Amazon.
After the election, the Post (11/8/25) noted that Democrats’ sweeping wins in northern Virginia came as “data centers seemed to be at the top of voters’ minds.” Yet a principal builder of those data centers, Amazon, went unnamed once again, as did Bezos.
The headline of another post-election analysis read, “Soaring electricity bills help flip state elections”; and the subhead read, “Data centers are spiking utility rates and angering voters.” But the Post column (11/19/25) failed to name Bezos or Amazon (except, once again, in the photo captions).
These recent examples are only the latest steps on an increasingly well-trodden path.
‘Part of something bigger’
Washington Post (7/27/25): “The most important question for the United States regarding artificial intelligence right now…is whether the US will maintain AI dominance.”
This summer, a Washington Post editorial (7/27/25) hailed President Trump’s investment in AI—without mentioning Bezos or Amazon.
In January, as Virginia state legislators weighed additional taxes and restrictions on data centers, the Post (1/18/25) quoted a director from the Data Center Coalition who threw cold water on the idea. Listed among the “Executive Level” members on the coalition’s website is AWS, the highly profitable cloud computing arm of Amazon. But the Post story doesn’t name Amazon or its founder.
A Post story (9/17/24) from last year also cited the Data Center Coalition without mentioning Amazon’s ties to the group. But any sins of omission in that story paled in comparison to sins of commission, as the Post spotlighted data center employees from across the country who found near religiosity in their work, giving the story the feel of a recruitment pitch, rather than journalism.
“It might sound nerdy, but I like completing the connections…. It gives me a sense of satisfaction,” a technician in San Jose told the Post. “What I’m working on is important,” said a worker in Phoenix. “You feel a part of something bigger.” Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a self-described tech nerd is said to have switched careers because of “the sheer excitement of stepping inside data centers.”
This last story at least disclosed the paper’s connection to Bezos and Amazon.
Whole-of-government gravy train
New Yorker (11/3/18): “In July [2018], Jeff Bezos became the richest man in modern history, when his net worth topped $150 billion dollars.” Seven years later, Bezos is the fourth-richest human, with $230 billion; his old fortune would put him 9th on the list.
The bigger story here may be how thoroughly tech giants like Amazon have corrupted our country—and nowhere has this played out more visibly than in the DC region, although you wouldn’t know it from reading the Washington Post.
Despite being the “poster child” of a tax cheat, in 2017 Amazon nevertheless requested states pony up public goodies if they wanted to land the company’s second headquarters (CounterSpin, 10/25/17; FAIR.org, 3/14/18). And states did just that, even though Amazon had long eyed DC, owing to its billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon, CIA and other federal agencies.
Another reason Amazon wanted to locate near the seat of power is because the federal government represents the greatest threat to the company’s continued dominance (at least it did until Trump reclaimed power and fired Lina Khan, the trust-busting Federal Trade Commission chair).
“The only thing in between Amazon and $1 trillion and $2 trillion in market cap is regulation,” economist Scott Galloway told the New Yorker back in 2018, when the company became the second one (after Apple) whose stock was worth a trillion dollars. “No one is going to regulate the gentleman throwing out the first pitch of the 2019 Washington Nationals season.” Amazon’s market cap today: $2.5 trillion.
While Virginia ponied up as much as $750 million to “win” the HQ2 contest—much to the Post’s delight—many of the promised high-paying jobs haven’t materialized (and may never, as Amazon is busy firing “thousands of corporate workers as it spends big on AI”—NPR, 10/28/25). This hasn’t meaningfully slowed Virginia’s whole-of-government gravy train, where everything from transportation to infrastructure to education is tailored to Amazon’s needs.
Meanwhile, when Amazon returns even a fraction of the public dollars it has gobbled up, the Post (6/16/21) celebrates the company’s generosity in headlines like “Amazon Will Help Fund 1,000 Affordable Housing Units Near Metro Stations.”
Less touted in the pages of the Post are Amazon’s strong-armed tactics. In its deals with Arlington County and the state of Virginia, Amazon not only gets millions of local tax dollars, but confidentiality clauses enable the company to weigh in on how officials respond to freedom of information requests regarding Amazon’s deals. The Post (3/15/19) covered this issue, but by the next day the paper had moved on.
‘Always only about business’
When Jeff Bezos purchased the Post over a decade ago, he said he was doing so out of a sense of civic duty. But that pretense died the moment Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election. In the year since, Bezos has only continued lavishing gifts on Trump, while also remaking the Post in Trump’s image.
This serves Bezos’ business interests, which are paramount for him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company Blue Origin told the Post (10/30/24) last year. “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
Bezos simply isn’t going to let his newspaper get in the way of his business—and the WashingtonPost’s coverage of data centers shows that.
The Seattle Times (11/17/25) cast a jaundiced eye on “the civic adventure of having a new socialist mayor.”
New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.
She credited her win to a “volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated,” AP (11/13/25) reported. The wire service noted that “universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety and stable, affordable housing are among her priorities”—similar to those of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Corporate media are not happy about her victory, priorities or rhetoric. The Seattle Times editorial board (11/17/25) said upon her victory that she “painted her opposition as big businesses content with keeping people down,” and countered that residents will “fear that no one will come when they call 911, that parks will be unusable, that small businesses will shutter because of crime and revenues that don’t keep up with expenses.”
‘Woke Republic of Seattle’
Wall Street Journal (11/13/25): “Lawbreakers may get a pass, but Ms. Wilson wants to get tougher on the productive parts of Seattle’s economy.”
The reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/13/25) called Wilson “Mamdani West,” and described her as “soft on crime but tough on businesses.” The paper scoffed, “Maybe Ms. Wilson will moderate her views once she is confronted with the responsibilities of office, but the campaign had little evidence of that.” The board ended, sarcastically, “Good luck.”
In a smaller editorial, the Journal (11/17/25) mocked the “Woke Republic of Seattle,” quoting Wilson saying:
“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”
The editorial board continued:
Now, that is some coalition. But what’s a 2SLGBTQIA+ community? We looked it up. It’s apparently an acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the + covering anybody who feels left out.
With all of these groups to satisfy, we’re not sure there are enough jobs to go around. But may the Two-Spirit be with the mayor.
The New York Times (11/13/25) gave Wilson’s win tepid coverage, offering an unexciting news piece that failed to put her victory into context or contemplate the gravity of ousting a powerful incumbent. It also, bizarrely, quoted that defeated incumbent—and never quoted the actual winner of the race.
Childcare and other ‘goodies’
The only potential “silver lining” the Washington Post (11/16/25) sees in Katie Wilson being elected along with progressive allies is that “the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies—which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.”
But it was the Washington Post editorial (11/16/25) about Wilson’s win that takes the cake here. And that makes sense: Socialist and left-wing activists in the Puget Sound point fingers at Amazon and other corporate giants as the main drivers of inequality.
The Post is owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration this year as president, the Post has vowed to become more right wing on the editorial page (NPR, 2/26/25). This fall the opinion page took a “massive stride in its turn to the right by hiring three new conservative writers after losing high-profile liberal columnists,” as the Daily Beast (10/2/25) noted.
First, the Post belittled Wilson’s proletarian life and went on to degrade her political priorities for being tied to her economic position. It said:
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” childcare and other goodies.
“Goodies” in this case mean services that make life affordable for a working parent who doesn’t own much, like Wilson. This is in a town with feudal levels of inequality: “While one-third of residents are classified as low-income, one out of every 14 is a millionaire” (KCPQ, 6/12/24). Seattle’s housing rental costs are “among the highest in the nation, ranking 16th among the country’s 100 largest cities,” while the city’s “median rent is now also 47.4% higher than the U.S. average of $1,375, placing it on par with prices in Los Angeles and Oakland” (KCPQ, 3/7/25). An op-ed in the Seattle Times (3/18/25) noted that in the state generally “Hunger is on the rise” while “Food banks and meal programs are on the front lines of an unprecedented hunger crisis.”
This is truly a “let them eat cake” moment for the Bezos Post. The Post went on:
The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.
Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.
It’s bad enough that a paper owned by a Bond villain is mad that the next mayor of an expensive city has too much compassion for the homeless. But the dismissal of the grocery store idea isn’t based in fact, as Civil Eats (8/20/25) noted that “publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail.” Civil Eats said that “every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA),” with more than 200 stores around the world generating $5 billion in annual revenue. The outlet added, “If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”
‘Identifying class enemies’
“A new era of class warfare has begun in New York,” the Washington Post (11/8/25) opined, “and no one is more excited than Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani.”
The editorial was an echo of the Post’s earlier pearl-clutching (11/8/25) in response to Mamdani’s victory speech:
Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies—from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers—and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.
Bezos, as part of the billionaire class, finds himself as the target of this year’s leftward electoral swing. “Affordability” was Mamdani’s buzzword, an offense to the Bezos board, who wanted to hear “growth,” a catchphrase for the financial elite. Bezos’ position makes sense from his rarefied position, but that is precisely why billionaire-owned media, whether it’s the Ellison family’s consolidation of TikTok and CBS or the Murdoch empire of Fox News and the New York Post, are bad for democracy. These are media that are materially situated to side with landlords and bosses over tenants and workers, but there are no outlets in major media with editorial boards that consistently lean in the other direction.
Once again, these editorial boards are not afraid that Wilson and Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.
These media don’t grapple with why voters aren’t scared of socialism and want the rich to pay more for services. It is up to them to make a case that voters should choose a political platform of consolidating political power with the billionaire class.
Featured Image: The Wall Street Journal‘s depiction (11/13/25) of Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson–with correction of the underexposure traditionally applied by corporate media to official enemies to make them look sinister.
Since August, the US has been amassing military assets in the Caribbean. Warships, bombers and thousands of troops have been joined by the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in the largest regional deployment in decades. Extrajudicial strikes against small vessels, which UN experts have decried as violations of international law, have killed at least 80 civilians (CNN, 11/14/25).
Many foreign policy analysts believe that regime change in Venezuela is the ultimate goal (Al Jazeera, 10/24/25; Left Chapter, 10/21/25), but the Trump administration instead claims it is fighting “narcoterrorism,” accusing Caracas of flooding the US with drugs via the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua, both designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
Over the years, Western media have endorsed Washington’s Venezuela regime-change efforts at every turn, from cheerleading coup attempts to whitewashing deadly sanctions (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21, 1/22/20). Now, with a possible military operation that could have disastrous consequences, corporate outlets are making little effort to hold the US government accountable. Rather, they are unsurprisingly ceding the floor to the warmongers.
Fabricating ‘tensions’
ABC‘s report (11/18/25) presents at face value Trump’s claimed rationale for a possible attack on Venezuela: “to stop drug traffickers.”
Despite Washington ominously amassing naval assets and issuing overt threats against Caracas, Western journalists often talk of “tensions” between the two countries (Fox, 11/17/25; ABC, 11/18/25), or even a “showdown” (Wall Street Journal, 10/9/25; Washington Post, 10/25/25). This is conceptually similar to the framing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a “conflict” with Hamas (FAIR.org, 12/8/23), except in this case the media does not have an equivalent of October 7 to rationalize all the atrocities by the US and its allies.
Though the Trump administration has largely abandoned the traditional US exceptionalist discourse of promoting “freedom” and “democracy,” that has not stopped corporate journalists from relentlessly demonizing the Venezuelan government.
Journalists are quick to label Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently facing hundreds of Tomahawk missiles pointed at his country, an “authoritarian” (Guardian, 11/14/25; New York Times, 10/15/25😉 or an “autocrat” (Wall Street Journal, 11/5/25; Washington Post, 10/24/25). In contrast, the same pieces place no labels on the Trump administration despite its authoritarianism both at home and abroad (Guardian, 10/16/25; CNN, 8/13/25).
Articles in the Guardian (11/6/25, 10/22/25) describe US operations in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) as success stories, fawning over special operations forces while ignoring the deadly impact. The Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo became known as “Little Hiroshima” after civilians were massacred there during the US invasion.
Very few outlets recall more recent US interventions, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, which according to Brown University’s Costs of War project have killed an estimated 4.5–4.7 million people over the past two decades. Such “accumulation by waste” has seen $8 trillion transferred to the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Washington’s steady escalation in the Caribbean has evoked memories of the buildup to the Iraq War, when Washington also counted on crucial support from the media establishment to manufacture consent for imperialist war (FAIR.org, 2/5/13, 3/22/23).
At that time, corporate media parroted White House claims about Iraq’s hidden arsenal, despite evidence that Iraq had destroyed its banned weapons arsenal, in contradiction to the White House’s case for war (FAIR.org, 2/27/03). Fast forward more than 20 years, and once more there is ample information undermining the administration narrative, this time about “narcoterrorism.”
Reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have consistently found Venezuela’s Eastern Caribbean corridor to be a marginal route for US-bound cocaine trafficking, with former UNODC director Pino Arlacchi estimating that only around 5% of Colombian-sourced drugs flow through Venezuela (L’Antidiplomatico, 8/27/25).
These findings have been corroborated by the DEA itself. For instance, the agency’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment report does not even include the word “Venezuela.” The 2025 report only has a small section on the gang Tren de Aragua, which dismisses any ties to the Venezuelan government and places its drug trafficking activities “mainly at the street level.”
Yet these glaring flaws in the Trump administration’s casus belli are often overlooked by Western media. Several outlets reporting on potentially imminent US strikes mention the White House’s declared anti-narcotics mission but conveniently omit the fact that, even according to US agencies, fewer drugs flow through this region than many others (Guardian, 11/11/25; Washington Post, 11/14/25; Bloomberg, 11/14/25; New York Times, 11/14/25).
Former UNODC director Arlacchi pointed out that “Guatemala is a drug corridor seven times more important than the Bolivarian ‘narco-state’ allegedly is.” He accused Washington of hypocritically driving the anti-Venezuela narrative due to interest in its massive oil reserves.
‘Maduro denies’
The Italian outlet L’Antidiplomatico (8/27/25) calls the “Cartel of the Suns “an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness monster, but suitable to justify sanctions, embargoes and threats of military intervention against a country that, coincidentally, sits on one of the largest oil reserves on the planet.”
With the “narcoterrorism” accusations against Maduro and associates, Western journalists absolve US officials of the burden of proof (New York Times, 11/4/25; Financial Times, 10/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 11/5/25). There has never been any public evidence about Maduro, or other high-ranking Venezuelan officials indicted by the US, being involved in drug trafficking via the Cartel of the Suns, while a leaked US intelligence memo rejected the notion of government ties to Tren de Aragua.
The Cartel of the Suns’ very existence is far from established, with subject experts contending that, while drug trafficking may be entwined with corruption in Venezuela’s military, there is no evidence of a centralized structure going all the way up to the president (InSight Crime, 11/3/25, 8/1/25; AFP, 8/29/25).
Instead of exposing the unfounded accusations and providing data from experts and specialized agencies, Western outlets either let Trump’s case for war go unchallenged, or merely present a dissenting opinion from Maduro, whom they have systematically demonized (New York Times, 10/06/25; DW, 11/14/25; NPR, 11/12/25; CBS, 10/15/25; CNN, 11/14/25).
This behavior is certainly not new, as Western outlets have consistently pushed the unfounded “narcoterrorism” narrative, going back to the first Trump administration (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). Similar unfounded accusations of drug trafficking were made against Nicaragua in the 1980s (Extra!, 10–11/87, 7–8/88; FAIR.org, 10/10/17), which served to justify US attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government through the CIA-backed Contras.
Warmongers to the stage
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (11/17/25) says that the Maduro government’s “catastrophic misgovernance has generated a mass exodus of refugees”—a paragraph before writing that “economic sanctions against the regime in Trump’s first term” succeeded in “immiserating ordinary people.”
In his typical style, Trump has sent mixed signals over whether he wants to strike targets inside Venezuela, with contradictory on-record and unofficial statements going back and forth. When asked if the White House is seeking regime change in Venezuela, Trump has been noncommittal (Wall Street Journal, 11/4/25). It is worth recalling that in June, Trump similarly sent all sorts of inconsistentmessages before ultimately attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
True to form (FAIR.org, 2/9/17, 4/13/18, 7/3/20), many liberal establishment outlets have been more bellicose than the US president they have occasionally chided for murdering scores of civilians in the Caribbean (The Hill, 10/30/25; Foreign Policy, 11/7/25). The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (1/14/25, 10/10/25, 11/17/25) has advocated for a regime-changing military intervention for months (FAIR.org, 2/12/25). Quite tellingly, Stephens does not regret supporting the Iraq War (New York Times, 3/21/23).
The Washington Post published an editorial (10/10/25) after the recent Nobel Peace Prize award to far-right Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado, arguing that US interests would be “better served” by someone like Machado, a firm endorser of US-led regime-change (FAIR.org, 10/23/25). But with the war drums beating louder, the Jeff Bezos–owned paper granted a column (11/12/25) to John Bolton, a former Trump adviser whose main criticism was that the administration is not being efficient enough in overthrowing Maduro.
Bolton, an architect of the Iraq War, and of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela during Trump’s first term, bemoaned the White House’s “inadequate” explanations about the ongoing lethal boat strikes and international quarrels as damaging the “laudable goal” of throwing Venezuela into chaos.
Bolton went on to urge the administration to create a better “strategy,” which includes “greater efforts to strangle Caracas economically.” The Washington Post is happy to platform a call for escalating measures that have already caused tens of thousands of deaths (CEPR, 4/25/19).
Finally, the former Trump official says that “we owe it to ourselves and Venezuela’s people” to violently oust the Maduro government, despite opinion polls showing that such a military intervention is widely rejected both in the US and in Venezuela.
Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas (11/4/25) went one step further by saying the quiet part out loud: “Venezuelan Regime Change May Open Oil’s Floodgates.” Blas rejoiced at the prospect of a “US-enforced change of ideology” that would install a “pro-Western and pro-business government,” which would do wonders for energy markets in the long run.
Unfazed by the human cost of a military intervention, the corporate pundit was only concerned about the possible impact of Venezuela’s current 1 million daily barrels of oil being wiped out. Who cares about millions of Venezuelans when a “brief military campaign” could drive oil prices down and secure a steady supply in the 2030s?
Complicity with war
Ranking House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jim Himes told NPR (11/5/25) that “the administration has finally shared their legal defense for the strikes at sea”—though NPR‘s listeners did not get to hear what it is.
The White House’s military build-up and illegal strikes have drawn widespread condemnation and opposition, even from within the US political establishment (NPR, 11/5/25; Intercept, 10/31/25). US politicians have also raised alarm bells about a potential military intervention in Venezuela without congressional approval (New York Times, 11/18/25; Politico, 11/6/25), but these voices feature much less prominently than the administration’s.
There is hope that a combination of Venezuelan defense deterrence with domestic and international pressure, coupled with Trump’s own unpredictability, might ultimately avoid yet another US regime-change military assault.
But should the worst come to pass, the media establishment will have once again done nothing to stop yet another deadly US foreign invasion. Over weeks of military buildup and threats, corporate outlets elected to ignore the evidence disproving Trump’s claims and to platform warmongers. They will not wash the Venezuelan people’s blood off their hands.
“Jimmy Carter” (Onion, 1/25/17): “Did you worry I might be cutting deals in back rooms with the peanut butter lobby? Or that I might be too busy at harvest time to focus on the economy or the Middle East?”
If any Onion opinion piece fully captures the corruption and venality of Donald Trump’s administrations, it’s one “authored” by former President Jimmy Carter (1/25/17) headlined, “You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got to Be President.” To be accurate, the farm was put into a blind trust (USA Today, 2/24/23), but contrasting the urgency of the potential conflicts with Carter’s humble agricultural asset to the unrestrained wheeling and dealing of the Trump machine paints the whole scene.
Trump had barely started his first term when the Onion piece came out, but nearly a year into his second administration, the satirical piece truly illustrates the degree to which the Washington establishment has seemed to accept that there will always be conflicts of interest in the White House, and that Trump’s policies will always be intertwined with his family’s profiteering.
It is a hallmark of corrupt societies that institutions like the media simply accept that payoffs and the personal business interests of politicians supersede public service. A good example of this casual resignation to a corrupt regime came from the New York Times (11/15/25) under the headline “Trump Organization Is Said to Be in Talks on a Saudi Government Real Estate Deal.” The subhead: “The chief executive of a Saudi firm says a Trump-branded project is ‘just a matter of time.’ The Trump Organization’s major foreign partner is also signaling new Saudi deals.”
The front-page report by Vivian Nereim and Rebecca Ruiz focused on Trump’s relationship with Dar Global, his business’ “most important foreign business partner and a key conduit to Arab governments and Gulf companies.” The Times matter-of-factly said that Dar “paid the Trump Organization $21.9 million in license fees last year,” noting that “some of that money goes to the president himself.”
The entire piece, in fact, presented this development in Saudi Arabia with a lackadaisical editorial attitude toward the president using the federal government that he administers as a channel for his family’s businesses, without much commentary from experts about the conflicts of interest. “The Trump Organization is in talks that could bring a Trump-branded property to one of Saudi Arabia’s largest government-owned real estate developments,” it began. It went on to say that “the negotiations are the latest example of Mr. Trump blending governance and family business, particularly in Persian Gulf countries,” without ever raising a question how that “blending” might undermine the presidency.
‘Maybe a little bit clever’
The New Republic (5/13/25) writes that “what is happening now is unquestionably the biggest corruption scandal in American history”—which is not the impression you would get from reading the New York Times (11/15/25) about Trump’s “deal-making.”
Earlier this year, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut (5/13/25) said after Trump accepted the gift of a $400 million luxury plane from Qatar: “Usually, public corruption happens in secret.” But Trump “isn’t hiding it like other corrupt officials are,” Murphy noted, because “his corruption is wildly public, and his hope is that by doing it publicly, he can con the American people into thinking that it’s not corruption because he’s not hiding it.”
The New Republic (5/13/25) didn’t mince words on Trump’s business in the Gulf: “America Has Never Seen a President This Corrupt,” it announced in a headline, with the subhead, “Trump’s brazen use of the White House to advance his family businesses should be one of the biggest scandals in the country’s history.”
The New York Times reported:
“Nothing announced yet, but soon to be,” Jerry Inzerillo, chief executive of the Diriyah development and a longtime friend of President Trump, said in an interview. He said it was “just a matter of time” before the Trump Organization sealed a deal.
Saudi officials toured the Diriyah development with Mr. Trump during the president’s official state visit in May, with the goal of piquing his interest in the project, Mr. Inzerillo said.
“It turned out to be a good stroke of luck and maybe a little bit clever of us to say, ‘OK, let’s appeal to him as a developer’—and he loved it,” Mr. Inzerillo said.
Next week, Prince Mohammed is expected to make his first visit to the United States in seven years. He hopes to sign a mutual defense agreement with Washington and potentially advance a deal to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
This is friendly, pro-business portraiture that basically repurposes Trump family public relations for the news page. The report only faintly touched on the ethical, saying that the situation creates a “scenario in which Mr. Trump discusses matters of national security with a foreign leader who is also a key figure in a potential business deal with the president’s family.”
The Times perhaps believes that simply narrating these things, without highlighting their egregious nature, is pushback enough. But it’s well past time for the kind of journalism that raises a lazy eyebrow at blatant corruption.
‘Ordinary in the Gulf’
“Deal-making and diplomacy are increasingly intertwined for Mr. Trump and his family members,” the New York Times (11/15/25) writes, in a formulation Trump would likely embrace.
A related New York Times piece (11/15/25) published the same day by the same reporters carried the headline “A Mideast Development Firm Has Set Up Shop in Trump Tower,” with the subhead: “Dar Global bet big on the Trump name. It is now an essential foreign partner for the Trump Organization.” Ruiz and Nereim in passing admitted that Trump’s Gulf deals “have shattered American norms,” but offered no other commentary about the potential corruption. They gave the last word to the president’s son, Eric, who said, “We have the greatest partners in the world in Dar Global.”
The Times reporters used the same “shattered norms” expression in their other piece that day to indicate that some people in the democratic West might not approve of this kind of governance, but then reminded us that in the oil-rich Wahhabist monarchy, this is just how things are done. “The recent blending of business and politics has shattered American norms,” the article said, adding, “but is ordinary in the Gulf, where hereditary ruling families hold nearly absolute power and the phrase ‘conflict of interest’ carries little weight.”
It also wrote that “Dar would later call finalizing its first Trump collaboration ‘a straightforward but pivotal moment.’”
A keener editor would have seen the problem with nonchalantly passing off the corrupt practices of self-serving theocracy as normal. Saudi Arabia receives an abysmal score of 9/100 on the Freedom House index, and ranks 162 on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom list, behind Cambodia and Turkey.
No journalist can forget that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul (Guardian, 10/2/20). The country has a terrible record on workers rights (Human Rights Watch, 5/14/25) and free speech (UN News, 9/15/23). While it has lifted its notorious ban on women driving (BBC, 6/24/18), a coalition of rights groups last year highlighted the “targeting of women human rights defenders, use of the death penalty, lack of protection for women migrant domestic workers, the persistence of a de facto male guardianship system,” and other concerns (Amnesty International, 11/18/24).
‘Likely unconstitutional’
When the New York Times (11/15/25) reports on Trump’s self-enrichment as “blending governance and family business,” it is part of that “culture of corruption” (6/7/25).
The New York Times (3/27/24, 1/17/25, 2/17/25, 5/13/25) has reported on Trump’s potential conflicts of interest in the past. As the Times editorial board (6/7/25) said last spring, Trump
and his family have created several ways for people to enrich them—and government policy then changes in ways that benefit those who have helped the Trumps profit. Often Mr. Trump does not even try to hide the situation. As the historian Matthew Dallek recently put it, “Trump is the most brazenly corrupt national politician in modern times, and his openness about it is sui generis.” He is proud of his avarice, wearing it as a sign of success and savvy.
All of this might spark some curiosity at the Times about Trump’s objectives in the Gulf, and what consequences his policies and personal dealings could have for the broader region. Alas, nothing.
“The whole point of the piece is—or should be—that making multi-billion dollar real estate deals with the Saudis represents a huge conflict of interest that is likely unconstitutional,” said Craig Unger, author of several books on Republican presidents and their ties to corrupt regimes, including the Saudi monarchy. He told FAIR that Trump’s “family is raking in millions, if not billions, from a country that has played a huge role in fostering terrorism and has a history of extraordinary human rights abuses.”
He added, “It’s striking that the Times didn’t bother to interview Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, or a comparable figure to spell out precisely what those conflicts are.”
In Unger’s view, the Times has shrugged off a glaring crisis of legitimacy.
“Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution prohibits any US official from accepting titles, gifts, or payments from foreign monarchs or states without congressional approval,” he said. “How is it that they don’t mention the fact that the deal is likely unconstitutional?”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.
Is a 50-year mortgage a good idea? CNN (11/11/25) tells readers—maybe!
Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte soft-launched the idea that housing mortgages should be for 50 years, rather than the standard 30 years. The palace intrigue (Politico, 11/10/25) that erupted after his announcement suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on.
And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl.
Trump tried to walk back the importance of the 50-year mortgage plan he’d already promoted online, and that Pulte called a “complete game changer”—telling Fox (Yahoo News, 11/10/25) he just thought it might “help a little bit.” This was as some media were already pointing out that the scheme would mean nominally lower monthly costs, but also that it would take people much longer to actually own their homes—as in, so much longer that they’d be dead first.
Reuters (11/11/25), among others, noted that “conservative lawmakers, influencers in Trump’s Make America Great Again Movement, and economists were among those to dismiss the idea,” while the Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/11/25) went straight to “A 50-Year Mortgage Is a Bad Deal.”
Meanwhile, over at NPR (11/12/25), we got “Three Questions About Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Plan” and at CNN (11/11/25), “Trump Just Floated a 50-Year Mortgage. Is That a Good Idea?”
‘Leveraged, exposed and beholden’
Stacey Patton (NewsBreak, 11/10/25): “A 50-year mortgage doesn’t just delay ownership, it transforms it into a lifelong lease…. You could spend your entire adult life paying for a house you never truly own.”
Author Stacey Patton broke it down for NewsBreak (11/10/25), writing that—along with the elimination of minimum credit score requirements, in favor of “holistic risk assessments”—the 50-year mortgage plan, while dressed up as “reform or a step toward inclusivity in a system that has long penalized Black and brown borrowers,” is in reality part of an effort to normalize permanent indebtedness.
“The promise of homeownership,” Patton wrote,
is being transformed into a subscription model for life that disproportionately ensnares young people of color already burdened by stagnant wages, student loans and rising living costs.
As important as the new mechanism is the old logic of extractive racial capitalism:
Instead of redlining them out, the new system pulls them in by offering entry points wrapped in the rhetoric of equality while ensuring they remain leveraged, exposed and beholden.
Shielding the propertied class
Eric Horowtiz (FAIR.org, 10/21/22): “Corporate media’s eagerness to peddle narratives favorable to the propertied class is to be expected, since many establishment outlets have a vested interest in the continued growth of housing prices.”
It’s not new for corporate media to have trouble finding the humane angle on housing. As Eric Horowitz wrote for FAIR (10/21/22) in 2022, much of Big Media’s coverage of the housing crisis
focuses on what are presented as three great evils: that landlords of supposedly modest means are being squeezed; that individuals and families living without homes destroy the aesthetics of cities; and that…people without homes pose a threat to the lives and property of law-abiding citizens.
These narratives aren’t just punching down; they’re misdirection, shielding the propertied class from scrutiny regarding a crisis of its own making—from which it derives immense profits—while blame is assigned to over-burdened renters and people who are unhoused.
And yes, it all has something if not everything to do with the fact that many corporate media outlets have deep financial stakes in real estate. You’ll never go wrong by following the money.
Featured Image: Donald Trump promoting the 50-year mortgage idea on Truth Social (11/8/25).
However, the Epstein/Mossad ties were often labeled by US corporate media as “unfounded” (New York Times, 8/24/25), dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times, 7/16/25), or said to have been “largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers” (New York Times, 9/9/25). Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has claimed that “Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.”
It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News—the nonprofit investigative outlet founded in July 2024—into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence. Despite the hack’s significant revelations, US corporate media coverage remains scant.
‘Knack for steering the superpowers’
Drop Site (10/30/25): “Epstein was an invaluable resource for Israel’s former prime minister [Ehud Barak]…even advising him on how to engage with the Mossad.”
Since 2024, a hacking group called “Handala” with reported ties to the Iranian government (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25) has carried out a series of cyberattacks targeting Israeli government officials and facilities (Press TV, 12/1/24; CyberDaily, 6/16/25).
Aspects of the Handala hack were published on the website of nonprofit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), including hundreds of thousands of emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest connections.
Since the hacked information was released, numerous independent media outlets—including Reason (8/27/25), All-Source Intelligence (9/17/25, 9/29/25, 10/13/25), Grayzone (10/6/25, 10/9/25, 10/13/25), the (b)(7)(D) (10/16/25, 10/21/25) and DeClassified UK (9/1/25, 11/3/25)—have published investigations on its contents. Among the independent media outlets, Drop Site’s coverage stands out for its in-depth research and broad scope.
Drop Site’s investigations into the Handala hack have included six major stories since late September, four of which have centered around “Epstein’s work on behalf of Israeli military interests, particularly as it relates to his role in the development of Israel’s cyber warfare industry.”
Drop Site reporters Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim (9/28/25) detailed how Epstein wielded his influence to expand Israel’s cyber warfare industry into Mongolia. Drop Site wrote:
Jeffrey Epstein…exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries.
In their next piece, Drop Site revealed (10/30/25) that Epstein created an Israel/Russia backchannel to attempt to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Hussain and Grim reported that Epstein also worked with Barak and Russian elites to pressure the Obama administration into approving strikes on Iran, demonstrating his “knack for steering the superpowers toward Israel’s interests by leveraging a social network that intersected the Israeli, American and Russian intelligence communities.”
In the same piece, Hussain and Grim quoted Epstein asking Barak to “wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal” with Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, and to “not go to number 1 too quickly.” Number 1 has long been a nickname for the head of the Mossad, DropSite noted.
Another article (11/7/25) recounted that Epstein sold surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire: “Epstein helped Barak deliver a proposal for mass surveillance of Ivorian phone and internet communications, crafted by former Israeli intelligence officials.”
Most recently, Grim and Hussain (11/11/25) reported that an Israeli spy regularly stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment. The spy, Yoni Koren, “made his intelligence career working in covert operations alongside the Mossad.”
Failing to cover the Handala hack
The New York Post (8/31/25) had no problem using Handala info to document Epstein’s ties to a disgraced British royal.
Hacked information must be handled ethically by journalists—including by verifying the files, considering public interest, concealing identities when necessary, and noting its origins. This is what Drop Site has done. And its reporting has significant public interest, revealing the ways in which Epstein served Israel’s interests.
Yet in a search of ProQuest’s US Newsstream collection for “Handala,” as well as a supplementary Google search, the only US corporate media outlet found to have covered the Handala hack is the New York Post (8/31/25). Its single 700-word story, drawing from Reason (8/27/25) and the Times of London (8/30/25), focused on how Prince Andrew stayed in contact with Epstein for five years longer than previously stated—sidestepping the revelations from Drop Site about Epstein’s ties to Mossad.
Hussain, who had not seen the New York Post story, said US corporate media is “deliberately ignoring” the story:
It’s such a goldmine of stories. They’re not going through it, they don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s very difficult for them to conceive what these emails refer to because they’ve spent so much time talking about it as a conspiracy theory. And now contravening evidence is emerging, or well-substantiated evidence, showing that it’s really not a conspiracy theory.
Indeed, recent mentions of Epstein’s ties to Israeli government officials have continued to dismiss them as conspiracy theories, ignoring the hack and Drop Site‘s work. For instance, an LA Times op-ed (10/10/25) on antisemitism in the GOP listed Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that “Epstein was a Mossad agent” (and accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza) as evidence of “appalling behavior,” alongside things like “entertaining Hitler/Nazi apologia” and suggesting that “Jews had something to do with [Charlie] Kirk’s death.”
The New Yorker (10/10/25) suggested that drawing a connection between “the war in Gaza” and “fealty to Israel” is part of a “dark alternative view of the world.”
The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang (10/10/25) asserted in his weekly column:
On Planet Epstein, everything that happens—the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the war in Gaza, the suppression of speech by the Trump Administration—proves the country is run by blackmail, pedophilia and fealty to Israel.
While it is of course absurd to blame “everything” on Epstein or Israel—and right-wing conspiracy theories that incorporate antisemitism are very real and dangerous—is it really unreasonable to blame “the war in Gaza” on too much “fealty to Israel”? After all, from October 7, 2023 to September 2025, the US sent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project—more than a quarter of Israel’s total post–October 7 military expenditures. Epstein’s evident connections to Mossad do raise the question of whether there is more to that “fealty” than the $100 million the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent on both parties during the 2024 election cycle (Common Dreams, 8/28/24).
By using the “conspiracy theory” frame, Kang not only overlooked the recently revealed files from Drop Site, but also failed to convey the full scope of Epstein’s influence, leaving the actions of associates and key government officials unscrutinized.
Other Handala revelations
All Source Intelligence (9/17/25) published a story based on the Handala leak documenting a Canadian billionaire couple’s support for an Israeli program to sabotage critics online.
Other aspects of the Handala hack have also been well-covered by independent media, including reports of billionaires funding an Israeli cyber campaign against anti-apartheid activists (All-Source Intelligence, 9/17/25). Other stories describe Iran striking a secret Israeli military site near a Tel Aviv tower (All-Source Intelligence, 10/13/25; Grayzone, 10/13/25), and Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, meeting with a top Israeli general to plan spying on Americans (Grayzone,10/6/25). The Grayzone (10/9/25) also reported that a former US ambassador secretly worked with a top Israeli diplomat to help Israel access several prestigious UN committees.
In Israeli media, Haaretz (3/9/25) reported that thousands of Israeli gun owners were exposed in an Iranian hack-and-leak operation. The paper (7/9/25) also revealed the leak of a database containing thousands of résumés belonging to Israelis who served in classified and sensitive positions within the Israel Defense Forces and other military and security agencies.
These details, like those about Epstein, have also been met with silence in US corporate media.
There has been wall-to-wall US corporate media coverage of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files and the battle over its release. So why has the hack largely been ignored by US corporate media? One possible reason is the hack’s likely origin. It has been reportedly attributed to Banished Kitten, a cyber unit within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25). Hacks purportedly emanating from Iran are rarely covered in US corporate media—and when they are, the origin of the hack, not its content, becomes the focus.
Corporate media have long shown a double standard on when it is and is not permissible to publish information obtained through hacking (FAIR.org, 11/24/09, 9/30/24).
Look no further than media coverage of the 271-page official dossier of then–Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, which revealed that the Trump campaign believed Vance “embraced noninterventionism,” among other purported vulnerabilities (Ken Klippenstein, 9/26/24). The US government alleged the Vance dossier was leaked through Iranian hacking (FAIR.org, 9/30/24). While the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico possessed the Vance dossier for weeks, they declined to publish it (Popular Information, 9/9/24).
The contents of the Vance dossier were eventually revealed by independent reporter Ken Klippenstein, as well-documented by FAIR contributor Ari Paul (9/30/24). Paul noted that while Klippenstein’s reporting pushed the story into the legacy media, “most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself” (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24).
Today, despite Drop Site‘s thorough and revealing reporting, the Handala hack has been almost completely ignored by US corporate media. Said Drop Site‘s Hussain:
A lot of these [media] organizations, it’s kind of not a secret, they have sympathies or ties to Israel, so it’s not a story which is appealing to them, it’s not politically convenient for these organizations, for the most part.
I think when something’s in the public interest, you report on it, and you’re transparent about where it came from. But in this case, [US corporate] media chose not to.
This week on CounterSpin: The palace intrigue around the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, soft-launching the idea of a 50-year mortgage suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on.
And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl.
Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multi-racial democracy, and we’ve talked about that a lot on the show. This week we revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates: Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Donald Trump’s 50-year mortgage scheme.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed Ball and Strikes‘ Madiba Dennie about the Supreme Court’s threat to the Voting Rights Act for the November 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: For those not trying not to see it, it’s clear that the Trump administration is trying to use every political lever available to entrench white political supremacy: in governance, in foreign and domestic policymaking, in education, in culture, in public knowledge and public imagination. The heart, if you will, of that effort is the familiar hatred and fear, and one of the spines is voting rights. You can use the trappings of democracy as cover for your corrupt racist system if you can somehow make sure that wide swaths of the country’s people don’t actually have a voice in terms of who they choose to represent them in the halls of power.
Pushing non-white people out of the electoral process has been the glimmer in the eye of many a politician, and many techniques have been tried. But the conservative majority of today’s Supreme Court sees that goal in their sights, with Louisiana v. Callais looking like their chance to use their special power to achieve a long-desired end.
Of course, Black and brown people aren’t going gentle into that good night. There’s no way advocates of multiracial democracy will let this Supreme Court be the last word on our political voice or possibilities.
Helping us see what’s happening is Madiba Dennie; she’s the deputy editor and senior contributor at the legal analysis site Balls and Strikes. She’s also author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Madiba Dennie.
Madiba Dennie: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Before we start on Louisiana v. Callais in particular, I wanted to say I appreciate the descriptor of Balls and Strikes as “premised on the reality that interpreting the law is an inherently political act with real-world consequences.” I think often the law is presented to us laypeople as something that exists in some pure form somewhere, and you dust it off and apply it, and then, wherever the chips fall, well, that’s “the law”. We would do better to get free of that understanding of how the law works, wouldn’t we?
MD: Yeah, it’s a very useful myth that obscures, as you were saying at the very start, that this is really a longstanding political project. This didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Pure application of law did not create this, either. These are things that conservative legal actors desired and sought out and are too often accomplishing.
JJ: So help us see what’s at work in this case: “packing and cracking,” conflated “Black” and “partisan.” What’s going on here in real-world terms?
MD: Well, Louisiana v. Callais, you really have a smorgasbord of political scheming. There’s a lot happening here.
So the case arises out of Louisiana’s redistricting in the wake of the 2020 census. The 2020 census showed that the population in the state had shifted; the Black population was growing. Roughly one in three Louisianans are Black. But when it came time to redraw the state’s electoral maps, the Republican legislature deliberately drew the maps in a way to limit Black people’s political influence to just one of its six congressional seats. So, again, Black people are a third of the population, but only in one of these six seats could they actually exercise any sort of political choice.
And the way that the legislature accomplished this is through what’s called “packing and cracking.” So they packed as many Black people as possible into this one district, said, “All right, Black folks, you can have that one, over there.” But as for the others, they cracked the Black population, putting just little bits of Black people in these five other districts, knowing fully well that politics are so racialized in the state, that there’s such a strong history of people voting on race lines, that no matter who these Black folks like, white people will vote as a bloc to overcome their vote. So it constrains the ability of Black people to make a political choice on equal terms with other voters.
This is very plainly unlawful. The 15th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees that citizens’ right to vote will not be diluted or infringed on the basis of race. But that’s what gerrymandering like this does. Because these voters are Black, they are being denied the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.
And so that’s why we have the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act is a landmark law enacted in the ’60s to finally implement the promises of the 15th Amendment, and the other amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, saying, “OK, we are going to really make sure that if some policy, whether it’s a voter requirement or whether it’s gerrymandering or what have you, whether there’s some law or regulation that results in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote because of race, that’s unlawful, that violates the Voting Rights Act.”
And so here’s where things start to get interesting in Louisiana v. Callais, because courts looked at the maps that the Republican legislature produced and said, “Yeah, this violates the Voting Rights Act. It’s discriminatory. Go back, do it again. You’ve got to make a new map.” So the Republicans begrudgingly go and make a new map that no longer discriminates against Black voters.
And then they get sued again, this time by a group of white voters. And this group of white voters says that the second map is actually also illegal, because fixing a racial gerrymander is also racial gerrymandering. So, yeah, their argument is that by taking race into account, they too are engaging in racial discrimination, because this is on the basis of race.
And so this is really a perversion of what the Voting Rights Act and what the Constitution are supposed to do. That’s very much not what that means. We’re trying to empower people of color and expand the political process with the Voting Right Act, and with the Reconstruction amendments, and here we’re seeing it really twisted on its head, saying that you can’t fix an injury that occurred on racial lines, because it also involves race.
So it creates this world where, if the court is to accept that, it just preserves the racist maps in the first place. So it leaves it untouched, because it deprives you of an opportunity to do something about it. It takes these critical tools away. So that is really what the court heard oral argument about recently.
I should also note that this was the second time they heard oral argument about these maps. They heard oral argument for the first time months ago, but they were dissatisfied with it, because under the law that exists, the map that the legislators made to fix the previous racist map, clearly that was legal. You are allowed to consider race insofar as your map before was racist and you’re fixing it. There’s a lot of law that supports that, as well as a lot of common sense.
And so the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court realized they weren’t quite happy with the way that case was going, and they wanted to switch things up a bit. So they invited the parties to submit some additional briefing, and they rescheduled the case for new arguments, which were heard recently.
And this time, the question was different. No longer were they asking about whether or not the maps complied with the Voting Rights Act or not. Now they’re asking if fixing a map under the Voting Rights Act, if that complies with the Constitution. And their argument here was, again, that there’s some sort of inherent tension between remedying racial gerrymandering and illegal racial discrimination.
JJ: I think that a lot of people are cottoning on now to the sheer weirdness, the idea that you can use race, or perceptions of race based on skin color, to wrestle people out of their homes and demand to see their papers. But colleges, for example, can’t acknowledge the race of applicants, because that’s unfair.
I understand that disinformation and confusion and chaos and fear are part of the point, but I think a lot of folks imagine that Supreme Court justices are somehow using a different kind of rationality than the bozo at the end of the bar. I just wonder, have the last couple of years, or decades, should they have changed our understanding of the actual role of the Supreme Court? Because it used to be, they have life term appointments, that means they’re above politics. I feel like that’s over, and we need to be in a place where we’re reimagining the role of the Court, period.
Madiba Dennie: “They are OK with using race to hurt people. They are not OK with using race to help people who are actual victims of racism.”
MD: Yeah, 100%. The life tenure doesn’t so much insulate the justices from the political happenings, but it rather empowers them to be able to carry out their political program forever, for the rest of their natural lives. Because these are, without any sort of unique insight, it’s really no different from the bozo at the end of the bar saying, “That seems racist to me, actually,” or “Where’s White History Month?” It’s the same kind of thing. “Where’s the Straight Pride parade?” It’s the same sort of nonsense.
It’s like, well, when you’ve been discriminated against, it’s a little bit different. Remedying a harm is different than inflicting harm. So if you want to go through Jim Crow, then we’ll talk about what kind of reparative measures are necessary.
But the conservative supermajority on the court is utterly disinterested in the idea that the Constitution has a role to play in actually addressing any of these historic and present injustices, even though, quite literally, that’s what the Reconstruction amendments were made for. But they don’t like that idea. And so they’re using this, really, overly formalistic notion about racial discrimination, where just any sort of consideration of race at all, even thinking about race, even if you’re fixing a racial injury, that too becomes off limits.
And yet, though, as you pointed out, apparently it’s fine to use race when you’re snatching people off the street; apparently that’s a fair thing to think about, for probable cause and making these stops. So what would be more accurate to say is that they are OK with using race to hurt people. They are not OK with using race to help people who are actual victims of racism.
JJ: And none of this is hypothetical. When the Supreme Court took out Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, we saw an immediate uptick in discriminatory voting practices, right? States were champing at the bit to do what they already wanted to do, and the court just unleashed them to do that. So this is not imaginary. This is not what might happen. This is what we can expect to happen.
MD: Yeah, we have evidence. We know what these states do when they’re left to their own devices. That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act, so that the federal government could create and enforce these national standards, to protect voters regardless of what state they’re in, by saying they shouldn’t be left to the whims of individual legislators.
And it’s really especially egregious when you think about it in the context of voting and gerrymandering, because people are supposed to be able to pick the elected officials who ostensibly represent them. But by keeping people away from the vote, and by making it harder, even if they do vote, for their votes to count the same as everybody else’s, by gerrymandering, what they’re saying is that the elected officials get to pick their voters, rather than the other way around.
It is just completely contradictory to the idea of a democratic government. And there’s really no good reason for this as a matter of law, as a matter of common sense, or good politics, like thinking about actually making a working democracy. It is unrelated to any of that, very much related to doing the opposite, and unwinding, reversing all the strides that the country has made over the past few decades to making democracy real for everyone.
JJ: And I guess what galls me, along with the reality, is the rhetoric that somehow this is about fairness, or somehow this is about equitable representation, or somehow it’s anti-discriminatory. They’re just employing this language that they know is going to tickle something in people’s brains, and think that it means what people understand it to mean, and they know they’re using it against its purposes.
And that’s why I’m so angry at news media, because I feel like they’re in a place to say, “Yes, they’re using these words. They don’t mean them in the way you understand them, in the way that history has presented them, and let’s actually unpack what they’re actually doing, rather than what they’re saying.”
So I just wonder, what would you ask folks to keep front in mind in terms of questions? What can we ask of news media? This is going to go forward. What should we keep in mind as we’re reading the reporting on Louisiana v. Callais, and all of the other assaults on voting rights?
MD: Yeah. Well, I think that with Louisiana v. Callais in particular, I think it’s really important to remember that the court literally asked for this. There was no reason for them to take this extra step. This is just something they wanted to do. And I feel like this is another thing that gets lost. We think about, “Oh, this case just happened to get before the court, and I guess they’re taking the opportunity.” It’s like, no, it actually goes further than that. They are creating the opportunity to shrink democracy more. They are making chances for themselves, and I think that’s important to remember.
I also think it’s important, regardless of what they actually say, what they say their reason is: What are the facts? What is their actual reason? Does the reason they’re giving make any sense? Why would they pursue this?
Also, what would make this illegal? If they say that, “Oh, this is unconstitutional,” say “why?” And they say, “Oh, because of this amendment,” it’s like, OK, but explain how that would actually mean that is illegal, because it doesn’t really follow. It doesn’t make sense to say that constitutional provisions that were created to allow Black folks, and later other marginalized people, to participate in the political process, it doesn’t make sense to say that that actually means you have to allow Black voters to be disenfranchised. You can’t square that circle.
So I would love to see media and people, regular folks alike, just sort of really interrogate, “So what do you mean by that?” Take the next step. Ask the question: “When you say that this is illegal, why?” Or when you say that this is a problem, what makes it a problem?
And this is perhaps the most important thing: What is the consequence of your action? What are you actually doing here? What is the real-world effect? Because we aren’t talking about something in the abstract. We’re talking about people’s real ability to make themselves heard at the polls.
In the same way that we see what happens without the Voting Rights Act, we saw the surgical precision of racist laws that were passed as soon as the Supreme Court took away another chunk of the Voting Rights Act a decade ago, we also see what happens when we have the Voting Rights Act. When the Voting Rights Act was passed, the amount of Black people who were able to participate in democracy skyrocketed. Voter registration jumped super high. There were way more Black people elected to office, because Black voters were able to make those choices. More funding was allotted to infrastructure projects in Black communities, because Black people had people who actually represented them.
So this is not just a nice, feel-good “It’ll be nice to have.” This is something we have a right to, because it deeply affects how we are able to live, whether we have the same rights to representation as everybody else, whether our needs can be met, whether we can actually take part in self-governance. And so it is a deeply gross perversion of the ideals embedded in the Reconstruction amendments to say that somehow compels the court to bless racial discrimination instead. It doesn’t make any sense, and people should recognize it as racist nonsense.
JJ: Your colleague, Jay Willis, wrote about how Republican Congress members are already skating where the puck’s going to be, as they call it. They’re already planning their pro-Republican redistricting. And so what does that suggest–some of us are like, “What’s the Supreme Court going to say?” And other folks are like, “Well, we already know what they’re going to say, and we’re already acting on it.” What does that say to the rest of us?
MD: Yeah. Well, I think it would benefit folks to really look at how the Republican politicians who were elected to office and the Republican politicians on the bench are working together, how one political project furthers the other. We are seeing the judiciary, specifically the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, most egregiously, really change the rules of the game, allow legislators to go for it, to live out their racial discrimination dreams and craft new districts accordingly, think about how they can best maximize the political power of a dwindling white conservative minority, while artificially suppressing the political power of everyone else. Republican electives are actively already working on this, because they know that the Supreme Court is on their side.
So I think another thing that folks must think about when we look at all of the harm the Supreme Court is doing is remembering that they didn’t do it alone. This is a group project, although they’re more than carrying their weight, but it is a group project. And if we are serious about repairing our democracy–or perhaps making a new, real democracy–we also have to think very seriously about court reform.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Madiba Dennie, deputy editor and senior contributor at Balls and Strikes. They’re BallsAndStrikes.org. She’s also author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, which is out from Penguin Random House. Thank you so much, Madiba Dennie, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Rachel Cleetus about climate complicity for the October 31, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The scattered headlines we’re seeing on COP 30, the annual UN climate conference, this year to be held in Brazil, indicate a distressing lack of appropriately urgent US media attention to the galloping harms of climate disruption, but also, or even more so, their negligence in calling countries and corporations to account.
Nothing in the US political world at the moment encourages or inspires, but our guest says it’s not the time to give up or look away. Rachel Cleetus is the senior policy director with the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She joins us now by phone from Massachusetts. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rachel Cleetus.
Rachel Cleetus: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: What, first of all, is the meaning of these conferences, of the parties? Are they still as important as they once were deemed? And then, what’s the significance of this one being hosted in Brazil?
RC: Briefly, they couldn’t be more important, because now we know that climate change is here, it’s at our doorsteps. We can see these devastating impacts everywhere. Just in the last week, it’s been horrifying to watch this climate change–supercharged storm, Hurricane Melissa, hit so many Caribbean nations. This is what climate change looks like today, and we are running out of time to help limit some of the worst impacts of it.
And meanwhile, we have an incredible opportunity in the transition to renewable energy, energy efficiency that can help lower electricity bills, that can clean up our air and water, that can help us address climate change, create jobs. This is what the future can hold if political leaders are brave enough to seize that opportunity.
And that’s why these annual talks matter. This is the moment to put pressure on our political leaders to do the right thing, to do what the world needs.
JJ: And having it in Brazil brings one of the crucial elements that is sometimes overlooked to the forefront, yeah?
RC: For sure. Brazil, in a way, encapsulates some of the deep challenges as well as the incredible promise of addressing climate change. This COP is happening on the edge of the Amazon forest, the “world’s lungs,” that help keep so many amazing, biodiverse ecosystems thriving, and which is now under such severe threat from climate change itself because of droughts and wildfires. So this is an opportunity in Brazil to recommit to the goals of the Paris Agreement, and raise ambition from countries across the world.
It’s no doubt a very fraught moment as well—geopolitics, climate realities, the destructive actions of the Trump administration—but, nevertheless, the science is clear, and what people need is equally clear.
JJ: I’m going to bring you back to that, but I wanted to ask you a question about cost, and you mentioned renewables. We know how often news reporting allows cost, however that is decided, to sort of be the end of the sentence. There’s a sentiment of, “Oh, well, we would love to do this obviously beneficial, humane thing, but ooh, look at the price tag.” You’re an economist, and I wonder what crosses your mind when you see, not just Trump saying renewables are somehow more expensive, but then journalists honoring that in the conversation, the kind of “some say, others differ” conversation we’re having now about the cost of renewable energy vis-a-vis fossil fuels.
Rachel Cleetus: “The fossil fuel industry is trying to preserve its own profits at the expense of people on the planet, and they are spreading a lot of disinformation.”
RC: The facts of renewable energy are very clear. In most parts of the world, renewable electricity is the cheapest form of electricity to install, bar none. That’s why we’re seeing such extraordinary growth in solar and battery storage and wind. It’s happening all around the world, in the US, in Europe, in China, in India.
It’s just that we have to accelerate that momentum, and instead, the Trump administration is taking deeply harmful actions to claw back clean energy progress in the United States. This is progress that’s been delivering jobs around the country and economic benefits, keeping us on the cutting edge of innovation, and the administration wants to take that all back.
So those are the facts on renewable energy. The problem here is, of course, that the fossil fuel industry is trying to preserve its own profits at the expense of people on the planet, and they are spreading a lot of disinformation about fossil fuels, and want to fight back against this transition away from fossil fuels. Of course, it will take finance, it will take money, to make this transition happen quickly, on the scale that climate requires.
Unchecked climate change is costly. It’s costly on our health, on our economy. And the science and economics shows that those costs will only escalate if we fail to curtail climate change and keep track of emissions.
JJ: We hear, as much as we hear about these annual conferences, that they set goals, and one goal in particular, based on the Paris Agreement, that’s not happening, that’s not being met. And if some things I read are true, well, that just means feedback loops, game over, that’s all she wrote.
Among other things, that doesn’t tell us how to act, that doesn’t tell us how to behave going forward, does it? I mean, I’m not trying to say “look on the bright side,” but people do want to know that there is still something they can do.
RC: Absolutely. This is a problem that we have caused as humans. We still have agency about what happens next, and it’s really, really important to remember that, because it’s crucial for the kind of planet we leave to our children and grandchildren. We cannot give up.
Yes, it’s true that the goal of limiting global average temperature to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, that goal is very likely going to be overshot within the next decade. But how long that happens, and how much further temperatures increase, that’s up to us. That’s up to the emissions choices we make today. It’s up to us how much we invest in resilience and adaptation to help protect communities from impacts that are already locked in, even now, at 1.3°.
And we have to remember, as you said, that if temperatures continue to increase, we are going to set off some feedback loops in the Earth’s systems that we cannot put back in the box. I’m talking about things like further loss of land-based ice that can trigger even more multi-century sea-level rise increase. Those kinds of impacts, even if we bring temperatures back down, once they get unlocked, the inertia and the physical systems will cause them to continue.
So it’s up to us now, as it has always been, to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, to stand up to the political leaders who are trying to obstruct progress, and really understand what’s at stake now for people around the world, and for all of these precious ecosystems, all around the world, that are being threatened by climate change.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally and briefly, I see today, former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy saying we could look to cities and states for climate action while we have this rocketing backwards into the past at the federal level. Is that something? Is it looking at different locations? Is that something you find meaningful?
RC: Yes, it’s absolutely an all-hands-on-deck moment to resist the harmful actions of this administration. And there are many states and subnational entities around the country. There are forward-looking businesses around the country that understand the reality of climate change, and are moving ahead regardless. Around the world, too, many countries remain very, very committed to climate action, because it’s in their own self-interest. They, too, are feeling the brunt of impacts right now, and want cheap, affordable, clean energy.
So this is a moment where the Trump administration needs to be isolated in its anti-science and destructive actions. This is the moment for the world to forge ahead regardless, because the stakes are too high. This is not a political partisan issue. This is about our planet, our children, future generations that are looking to us to make the right choices, right now.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rachel Cleetus from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Their work is online at UCS.org. Thank you so much, Rachel Cleetus, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Jacobin (11/5/25) offered an unsanitized review of Dick Cheney’s career.
The corporate media in the United States have rarely met a servant of empire who isn’t eligible for hagiography in death, whether or not they presided over mass murder worldwide. In the case of Dick Cheney, who died on November 4, media outlets have summoned everything in their power to sugarcoat the blood-drenched career of the most powerful US vice president in history, a position he notoriously occupied for the duration of the two-term administration of George W. Bush from 2001–09.
As VP, he was chief architect of the “Global War on Terror,” with a hands-on role in manufacturing the disinformation that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion based on imaginary WMDs and fictional ties to 9/11. The hundreds of thousands of deaths from that war are Cheney’s most significant legacy.
His lengthy resume also includes stints as White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford and secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush; in the latter role, he oversaw the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, in both of which the US killed large numbers of civilians. From 1995 until 2000, Cheney served as the obscenely remunerated CEO of sketchy US oil and engineering firm Halliburton.
Chip Gibbons summed up Cheney’s career in Jacobin (11/5/25):
Cheney rose to vice president as the result of a stolen election. Once in power, his attacks on democracy only worsened. Exploiting the 9/11 tragedy, he broke nearly every democratic norm to enact a regime of authoritarian, murderous policies. He not only was perhaps the single most destructive figure for American democracy in the 21st century—he left behind human carnage and death around the world.
‘Towering and polarizing’
In the first six paragraphs of CNN‘s obituary (11/4/25), we’re told that Dick Cheney was a “noble giant of a man” who was “among the finest public servants of his generation.”
Needless to say, this was not how Cheney was remembered by corporate media. CNN’s obituary (11/4/25) begins:
Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family.
Rather than dwell from the get-go on the blatant lies—pardon, “faulty assumptions”—that Cheney propagated in order to pulverize Iraq, the obituary first devotes several paragraphs to honoring him by quoting from said family statement:
Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing…. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.
Love and fly fishing probably aren’t the first things that come to mind at the mention of Dick Cheney for most Iraqis, Afghans, Panamanians, Guantánamo Bay inmates tortured by the CIA, and other victims of Cheney’s “kindness.” But CNN doesn’t ask them. In fact, the only major news outlet FAIR could find that interviewed someone impacted by his deadly foreign campaigns was the Associated Press (11/4/25), which found exactly what you’d imagine:
On a busy street in Baghdad, Ahmad Jabar called former Cheney a “bloodthirsty person.”
“They destroyed us,” he said of the Bush administration, “and Dick Cheney specifically destroyed us. How are we supposed to remember him?”
In the fifth paragraph of its obituary, CNN informs us that Cheney was “for decades a towering and polarizing Washington power player.” In the sixth, we have a brief eulogy courtesy of George W. Bush, who praises his former second-in-command as a “decent, honorable man” who will be remembered by “history…as among the finest public servants of his generation.”
‘The truth was more complex’
New York Times (11/4/25): “Democrats portrayed Mr. Cheney…as one of the most polarizing figures in politics,” but “the truth…was more complex.”
Indeed, there appears to be a corporate media consensus that terms like “polarizing” and “controversial” constitute the outer limits of acceptable critique when remembering mass murderers who happened to be US statesmen. AP (11/4/25) went with the headline: “Dick Cheney, One of the Most Powerful and Polarizing Vice Presidents in US History, Dies at 84.” PBS NewsHour‘s (11/4/25) was: “A Look at Dick Cheney’s Influential and Polarizing Legacy.”
The Wall Street Journal’s lead paragraph (11/4/25) similarly specifies that Cheney’s “role as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror made him one of the most powerful—and controversial—US vice presidents in history.” A subsection of the New York Times’ own unbearably long obit (11/4/25) is titled “Polarizing and Idolized.”
News outlets could hardly erase Cheney’s very public history of “controversy,” but they bent over backwards to paint it as simply a matter of perspective. In that Times subsection, the paper’s Robert McFadden explained that “Democrats” portrayed Cheney as “one of the most polarizing figures in politics, a manipulator who personified militarism, corporate corruption, government secrecy and environmental degradation.” It continued:
But to Republicans who idolized him, Mr. Cheney was a fundamentalist’s rock star—a cultural and political icon, the lifeblood of the conservative movement and the president’s firm right hand. To the faithful, he was also, like Mr. Bush, a man of God.
The truth lay somewhere in between and was more complex, according to White House associates, lawmakers and others familiar with Mr. Cheney’s activities, many of which were carried out behind the scenes. Only participants in those activities got glimpses of the nuances and the leverage at work.
First of all, the real “two sides” here are not “polarizing” and “idolized”; polarizing means dividing into two opposing sides, after all. And even among typically mealy-mouthed Democrats, there were those who called Cheney the war criminal he was, not just “personified militarism.”
What’s more, despite the New York Times‘ insistence that the truth must always lie between what Democrats and Republicans say, this case above possibly all others proves that article of faith to be false. That Cheney was a rock star to conservatives does not mean he was any less a bona fide war criminal.
But media regularly pit Cheney and his supporters’ views of his actions against those of “critics,” suggesting it’s simply a matter of opinion whether torture in the form of simulated drowning and rectal rehydration might be a war crime.
‘Helped resolve foreign problems’
CNN (11/4/25) included a photo of Cheney and his family applauding a statue of himself.
To return to CNN (11/4/25), for instance, we learn that the vice president’s “aggressive warnings” about such matters as Iraq’s—in reality nonexistent—weapons of mass destruction programs “played a huge role in laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003,” which along with the war on Afghanistan “led the US down a dark legal and moral path including ‘enhanced interrogations’ of terror suspects that critics blasted as torture.”
For his part, Cheney “insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable.” He was
also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—a practice that critics at home and abroad branded an affront to core American values.
In response to the 2014 CIA torture report, Cheney stated: “I would do it again in a minute.”
While “critics” at least got to question what they “blasted as torture,” there was no room for caveats when other brutal aspects of Cheney’s brutal legacy were related. In CNN’s one-line summary of the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Cheney was credited with having shown “considerable skill in directing” both assaults as Pentagon chief under Bush the elder. No mention was made of the hundreds or possibly thousands of civilian casualties of the US decision to bomb the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo to such an extent that the area earned the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”
The attack on Panama is also briefly referenced in Cheney’s New York Times obituary (11/4/25), as one of the “several foreign problems” that the then–Defense secretary “helped resolve…for Mr. Bush.” The Times notes that Cheney “coordinated” the invasion of the country, “whose dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega, was whisked away to Miami, convicted of racketeering and imprisoned.”
Again, never mind the slaughter that attended the resolution of that particular “foreign problem”—or the fact that Noriega happened to be a longtime CIA asset who had remained on the agency’s payroll. Why would any corporate media outlet take advantage of Cheney’s decades-long political history to comment on the evolution of imperial hypocrisy?
‘Skillful operative’
Washington Post (11/4/25): “Mr. Cheney’s role as the Bush administration’s leading advocate of an expansive, aggressive war on terrorism reflected his conviction that the 9/11 attack was a grave threat to the United States.”
As the obituaries proliferate in the establishment press, it’s hard to find a single one that isn’t complicit in sanitizing—to the extent possible—Cheney’s trajectory of mass destruction. The Washington Post (11/4/25) marks the passing of this “powerful vice president” who utilized his role as “chief strategist” during the Bush II years to “approve the use of torture and steer US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq,” while also making significant headway in the field of domestic espionage. In the aftermath of September 11, the Post‘s Barton Gellmanand Marc Fisher wrote, Cheney
conceived and supervised a wide-ranging new program of warrantless domestic surveillance…that circumvented legislative prohibitions and the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
But it was ultimately all in a day’s work, because “to Mr. Cheney, the war on terror was a new kind of conflict demanding new rules appropriate to what he called ‘the dark side.’” Who cares that, “time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong”—as in Iraq’s lack of WMD or ties to al-Qaeda—or that he voted
against a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa.
He also “opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund program for toxic-waste cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.”
Despite all of this, Cheney remains immortalized by the Post as a “hometown hero” and “skillful operative.”
‘Hard-charging conservative’
AP (11/4/25) credited Cheney with “a life of power that he exercised to maximum effect from the shadows.”
Last but not least, AP ‘s Calvin Woodward (11/4/25) made up for his inclusion of an Iraqi voice by offering an almost endearing take on the legacy of the “hard-charging conservative,” even while reflecting on his sinister reputation:
He was the small man operating big levers as if from Oz. Machiavelli with a sardonic grin. “The Darth Vader of the administration,” as Bush described the public’s view.
No one seemed more amused at that perception than Cheney himself. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
The force was with him.
Charming, indeed.
Once again, then, the US corporate media has shown its true colors by legitimizing and euphemizing the track record of someone who is responsible for an inconceivably massive quantity of suffering and death worldwide.
As Iraqi scholar and poet Sinan Antoon recently put it: “In a different world Dick Cheney would definitely be a war criminal and would be standing trial.”
But we’re stuck with the world we have—and the media aren’t doing anything to make it any better.
This week on CounterSpin: There is an argument evidently compelling to some: Yes, Black people have been enslaved and excluded and discriminated against for decades, such that today they are born in a hole in terms of wealth, of housing equity, of jobs. If we acknowledge that their discrimination was and is race-based, that would be saying race matters—but haha! Didn’t you all say you don’t want race to matter?
It’s an argument so specious a third grader could call it out. But if it comes from the Supreme Court majority, we are forced to consider it as serious, and enjoined to believe it is based in good faith. The history on these efforts helps us see a way forward.
Madiba Dennie is deputy editor and senior contributor at the legal analysis site Balls and Strikes, and author of The Originalism Trap:How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recentpresscoverage of Zohran Mamdani.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
In the first election since Donald Trump and the GOP have upended US democracy, Democrats won resoundingly in closely watched state and local races across the country. The biggest headline was the general election thumping of establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, but Democrats also won big in Virginia, New Jersey, California and Pennsylvania, among other places.
Corporate media acknowledged the strong rebuke to the Trump regime, but pundits and reporters across the country’s major national newspapers quickly warned Democrats against reading too much into Mamdani’s victory or shifting too far to the left.
‘Pragmatism and compromise’
The New York Times (11/4/25) urges Zohran Mamdani to break his promises on buses and childcare.
The New York Times editorial board (11/4/25), which, as it acknowledged, opposed Mamdani in the New York City primary (and then kept quiet in the general), offered the victorious candidate congratulations and a heaping helping of advice.
“He should start by building a leadership team light on democratic socialists,” the board counseled, “and heavy on officials with records of accomplishment and proven management skills.” While of course a mayor should surround themself with experienced and skilled people, it’s also unrealistic to ask them to shun the political organization that propelled them to victory.
According to exit polling, 24% of New York voters described themselves, as Mamdani does, as democratic socialists—and they made up roughly 41% of Mamdani’s voters. To suggest that this broad swath of the city should be excluded from governing because of their ideology smacks of McCarthyism.
Mamdani will find success by “marrying his admirable ambition to pragmatism and compromise,” the board wrote. What does that look like? Well, one of Mamdani’s central and popular campaign promises was free and fast buses. The Times instructed him to abandon the “free” part of that promise: “A better idea” is to offer “a reduced fare” on just some routes. Because voters love a politician who breaks a promise!
No ‘talent for moderation’
The Wall Street Journal (11/4/25) warns against raising taxes on the wealthy, noting that “the top 1% of taxpayers contribute about 40% of the city’s income-tax revenue.” Not noted by the Journal: Personal income tax provides only about 22% of the city’s total revenues.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/4/25), generally well to the right of the board at the Times, similarly hoped to find “a pragmatic streak” in Mamdani. It predicted “a challenge” for Democrats if Mamdani “inspires more leftist candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats,” or “begins to define the Democratic Party in the public mind.” It concluded with little hope, writing that Mamdani “has never demonstrated a talent for moderation.”
It would seem that “pragmatism” in the minds of the country’s establishment punditocracy means not the dictionary definition of “dealing with a problem in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist,” but instead something more like “upholding the status quo.”
The facts are that half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened, and an estimated 350,000 are without homes; freezing rent, building affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and asking billionaires and corporations in an increasingly unequal society to hand a tiny fraction of their profits back to the city are actually quite pragmatic solutions to those problems—unless you’re the elite media.
‘Learn the lesson from last time’
The Washington Post (11/5/25) reported that Virginia’s Democrats “lurched too far left” after “big wins in 2017 and 2019.” In fact, Virginia Dems in 2019 were embroiled in scandal, with two statewide officials found to have worn blackface and a third facing sexual assault charges. The three statewide offices were swept by Republicans in 2021.
Such admonishments weren’t reserved only for Mamdani. In a piece on the results in Virginia—where centrist Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s race by a 15% margin amid a statewide sweep—the WashingtonPost (11/5/25) acknowledged that the results were “a resounding rejection” of Trump’s second term, but then turned to a source who said Democrats “need to learn the lesson from the last time this happened, which is don’t misread the mandate.”
You see, the party “lurched too far left, after its big wins in 2017 and 2019, ushering in a backlash” that led to a GOP sweep in Virginia in 2021. “Now, he said, the Democrats may have a more promising path forward if Spanberger can fulfill pledges to govern as a moderate.”
One wonders what that even means; the Post never got around to telling readers. But that 2021 loss was not by a progressive; it was centrist Democrat Terry McAuliffe who lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin in 2021. As I pointed out at the time (FAIR.org, 11/5/21):
McAuliffe has been outspoken about Democrats hewing to the center on things like healthcare and corporate tax cuts, and backed two major fracked gas pipeline projects in the state while raking in big money from pipeline developers.
To elite media, if a centrist Democrat wins, it’s on the strength of their “moderation.” If they lose? Well, that’s the fault of progressives.
‘Springboard to nowhere’
Ross Douthat’s podcast (11/5/25) is called Interesting Times, for reasons that are unclear.
“Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think,” insisted New YorkTimes columnist Ross Douthat (11/5/25). Don’t believe those who would have you believe Mamdani can “remake the Democratic Party.” Why, you ask? Because “the media…tends to hype New York mayoral politics beyond its real significance,” and because “the office of mayor of New York City has tended to be a political springboard to nowhere.” It’s a very weird take for a columnist at a New York City newspaper.
Voters in any city would be pretty pissed if their mayor approached the job as little more than a springboard for national political ambitions. “There might be a future where Mamdani ends up getting elected as a governor or a senator,” Douthat allowed—which would seem to not leave out much but the presidency, which Mamdani as a naturalized citizen is ineligible for anyway.
But also, Mamdani doesn’t need to launch into national politics in order to impact them. What Douthat is really doing is pretending that a populist Democrat who rode a huge wave of enthusiasm despite—or even because of—holding positions the establishment strongly opposes can’t have a major impact on that party today.
‘Whichever winner fits their biases’
Michelle Cottle (New York Times, 11/6/25) seemed to suggest that one lesson Democrats should learn from New Jersey and Virginia is that there’s no need to “electrify the party’s base.”
Fellow Times columnist Michelle Cottle (11/6/25) advised readers to expect the “ideological tug of war between centrists and progressives” to “persist into next year’s midterms, as the competing wings brandish whichever winner from this week best fits their existing biases.”
She wrote this with an apparently straight face in a column arguing that while Mamdani “electrified much of the electorate with his rock-star persona and lefty politics,” centrist victories from Spanberger and New Jersey Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill “offer lessons that are more replicable for the party.”
What those lessons might be wasn’t entirely clear. In terms of campaign strategy, Cottle wrote, they did what Mamdani did: “leaned in hard on the economy and the issue of affordability.” The also won by “dragging Mr. Trump into their races and tying his excesses to their opponents”—but so did Mamdani.
Perhaps the difference was that they “largely steered clear of the culture-war issues”? And yet while their opponents tried culture-war attacks against both the centrists and Mamdani, all three candidates kept the focus on cost of living and Trump.
Cottle seemed to like that Spanberger and Sherrill had previously “staked out centrist positions and were known to buck their own leadership when the spirit moved them.” But those are the kinds of Democrats who—like former senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—block the party from taking the kind of actions they promise, leading to what a recent poll (Jacobin, 10/15/25) found to be the No. 1 voter complaint about Democrats: They don’t deliver.
At best ‘a big zero’
Republican claims that Mamdani is a “Soviet-style communist” go unrebutted in the Washington Post (11/5/25).
New York Times pundits were certainly not alone in desperately wanting Mamdani’s victory to have no impact on the ideological direction of the Democratic Party. At the Washington Post (11/5/25), Tuesday’s Democratic victories
kick off a year-long fight over who best personifies the Democratic Party as it heads toward crucial midterm elections: Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who will run New York City, or moderates like Abigail Spanberger, the centrist with a CIA background who was elected governor of Virginia.
What are the two sides of the debate here, according to the Post? If you’re thinking it’s pro-corporate centrists versus progressives, you aren’t thinking like a legacy political reporter. It’s actually “Republicans,” who say Mamdani’s victory “confirms that the party is in thrall to left-wing extremists,” and “Democratic leaders,” who are “eager to shed the ‘woke’ label that dogged their party in 2024.”
Early in the piece, reporters Naftali Bendavid and Yasmeen Abutaleb quote uber-centrist Rahm Emanuel and several GOP leaders, strategists and campaign ads. Finally, some 12 paragraphs in, the progressive perspective is given exactly two paragraphs:
Some progressives, however, say they welcome efforts to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, noting his ability to electrify an array of voters with an unapologetically liberal message.
A quote from Bernie Sanders constituted the second of the paragraphs, which was quickly followed by perspectives from “other Democrats” who sought to downplay the significance of Mamdani’s influence or role within the party. Every other source in the lengthy, quote-riddled piece was either a Republican or an establishment Democrat.
The piece closed with one of the latter. Former DCCC chair Steve Israel argued that Mamdani only impacts the midterms “if he overreaches as mayor of New York”:
If he governs too far to the left and there are daily headlines about his going too far, then yes, the narrative continues and could affect certain districts in the midterm election…. If he governs more reasonably, with less controversy over his views, it becomes a big zero in the midterm elections.
‘Bright spot’ for the GOP?
The Washington Post (11/5/25) said “some Democrats” are “worried about the socialist label sticking,” since their party has been framed as being “too concerned about special classes of Americans over others.” “Others” in this case presumably refers to billionaires.
Another WashingtonPost article (11/5/25) listed the “Winner and Losers from the 2025 Election.” The four winners included the obvious—like “Democrats”—and the much less obvious: “Republican attack ads for the next year.”
Reporter Amber Phillips explained: “In Mamdani, Trump and Republicans feel they’ve found the perfect foil for next year’s midterm elections.” In fact, Mamdani is “so far to the left that the top two Democrats in Congress, also from New York, hesitated to endorse him or just didn’t,” she wrote. She pointed to Trump’s social media claim that the “Radical Left…keep getting me, and other Republicans, elected!”
Politico (11/5/25), too, let the GOP frame Mamdani’s win as a victory for the right. “Republicans found their only bright spot in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral victory—one they believe will allow them to tie the national party to him at the hip.” Politico offered no reason to question this, only to support it:
Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs, the avowed socialist who sought the presidency from a prison cell, in the opening seconds of his victory speech only made Republicans’ case against him easier to prosecute.
No Dem playbook
Politico (11/5/25) suggests that Mamdani quoting Eugene V. Debs—who last ran for president in 1920—will help turn voters against Democrats in 2026.
Many outlets did seem to figure out that voters care a lot about the cost of living, which both the centrist and progressive candidates emphasized. Politico (11/5/25):
For as much as 2025 has dealt Democrats a series of intra-party proxy battles between progressives and centrists, on Tuesday night they coalesced around a message—affordability—that could bridge the divide ahead of the midterms.
The Washington Post (11/5/25) similarly found “one through line that connected all three winning campaigns: affordability.”
But the New York Times‘ Lisa Lerer (11/5/25) didn’t see it that way. Lerer managed to find weakness in the resounding nationwide victory:
Yet for all the invigoration that success brings, the Democratic Party still hasn’t coalesced around a coherent political identity or a clear electoral playbook that can win in swing states and safe states alike.
Corporate media will always push for that “coherent political identity” to be firmly centrist. But voters don’t just want promises of affordability; they want results. And a party beholden to corporate interests, that would rather tinker around the edges than push for real inroads against inequality, will have a tough time making good on those promises.
