Trump’s Cult of Power Cancels Free Speech

In the wake of Charlie Kirk s death conservatives have moved hastily to consolidate power and attack their political enemies whose relative impotence and penchant for capitulation to power and decorum have been on full display this week You have these right-wing forces that smell blood they smell weakness and they re going after everyone who doesn t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning disclosed Adam H Johnson a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast This week on The Intercept Briefing host Jessica Washington speaks with Johnson about the White House s weaponization of Kirk s death and the broader rightward tilt of the media ecosystem I think what they re doing in part is to make it very very formidable for Democrats to ever beat Republicans If you gut their media if you gut their nonprofits if you snuff out any kind of dissent if you punish people at the workplace and dox them says Johnson They re basically trying to make the new Obviously the scope is different but in terms of the sort of emotion the shock Obviously it was on video which adds to this extra layer of psychology that s being exploited They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they ve long demanded to jam in Johnson also noted that part of what we re witnessing with the increasing alignment between corporate media and Trump is the end of the veneer of liberalism among the billionaire class You have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina this kind of veneer of universalism and everything is just about the exercise of raw power the exercise of pure racist propaganda he disclosed So yeah things are bad But I think what we ve learned is that they can get worse Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen Transcript Jessica Washington Welcome to The Intercept Briefing I m Jessica Washington The war on free speech continues in the wake of Charlie s Kirk s killing On Wednesday ABC reported that it was taking Jimmy Kimmel s late night show off the air indefinitely because of comments he made about the MAGA movement politicizing the death The move came after the FCC Commission Chair threatened ABC and its parent company Disney This was just the latest domino to fall as the Trump administration works to punish critics and silence the left more broadly Earlier in the week in a broadcast of the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House and hosted by Vice President JD Vance White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed vengeance for Kirk painting anyone who dares to criticize the administration or the right as criminals and terrorists Stephen Miller It is a vast domestic terror movement With God and as my witness we are going to use every store we have at the Department of Justice Homeland Safeguard and throughout this cabinet to identify disrupt dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people It will happen and we will do it in Charlie s name JW Other White House agents have made similar remarks Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted the State Department had denied visas to people celebrating Kirk s death President Donald Trump also threatened the press suggesting on Tuesday that the attorney general would go after the media outlets who criticized him for hate speech Donald Trump Your company paid me million for a form of hate speech so maybe they ll have to go after you JW All of this is happening against a wider backdrop of media censorship and a push to remake news in the president s image From President Trump suing the New York Times for questioning his record including if he was responsible for making The Apprentice a TV hit To journalist-provocateur Bari Weiss reportedly being poised to effectively run CBS News to the Washington Post allegedly firing its last remaining full-time Black columnist Karen Attiah for highlighting racist remarks from Charlie Kirk media independence to review reality feels deeply imperiled Joining me now to break all of this down is Adam H Johnson He is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast Adam welcome to the show Adam Johnson Thank you so much for having me on JW And just because this is a quick-moving news story I want to tell everyone that we re speaking on Wednesday September So in the aftermath of the Kirk killing there s been a real dichotomy in the administration s response They eulogize Kirk as a defender of free speech but want to restrict what people can say about him Just a meager days ago Vice President JD Vance Stephen Miller and others made threats about targeting the left and the media in the wake of Charlie Kirk s shooting How could they go about punishing people and organizations AJ What s essential to understand is that there s obviously a very long history of exploiting traumatic moments to ram in preexisting agendas using the emotion of the moment to exploit people right You have obviously the creation of all kinds of draconian laws post- a large number of of which are by the way still being used nowadays to execute so-called war on terror And in fact Trump s blowing up of boats in Venezuela in recent times in the Caribbean rather have used the same legal authority that was established on September Obviously after Katrina charter school forces and the super wealthy who use that to privatize and to bring under state control schools in New Orleans There s all kinds of examples we could list the shock doctrine right It s stuff of how moments of trauma and heightened emotion are used to push preexisting agendas In this administration and those in its orbit specifically anti-Palestinian groups pro-Israel groups especially have been wanting to go after certain segments of the nonprofit world the foundation world take away their nonprofit status thus kind of rendering them no longer viable and then going after free speech more broadly in conjunction with this more avert right-wing takeover since Trump got in the office With respect to Jeff Bezos explicitly moving the Washington Post to the right They no longer have any Black columnists in a newspaper that s called the Washington Post a city that is the largest Black city in the country in terms of percentages You have the takeover at CBS of the Ellison family The Ellison family will now own very soon will own CBS News CNN and TikTok These forces have been brewing for a while in terms of snuffing out dissent Related Hegseth Leads Push to Punish Military Facility Members Over Charlie Kirk Comments You know there s a kind of conventional wisdom in specific parts of the liberal and left world that Trump does not plan on having an electoral contest in if not And I think that s partly true but I think that kind of misreads what he s definitely doing I think what they re doing in part is to make it very very complicated for Democrats to ever beat Republicans If you gut their media if you gut their nonprofits if you snuff out any kind of dissent if you punish people at the workplace and dox them as part of these kind of brown-shirt campaigns which we can get into of doxing people based on their comments on social media largest part of which are fairly benign And so you have this gathering storm as I wrote In These Times of all these anti-free speech anti-assembly anti-worker anti-Palestine forces that are all coalescing and they re basically trying to make the new Obviously the scope is different but in terms of the sort of emotion the shock Obviously it was on video which adds to this extra layer of psychology that s being exploited They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they ve long required to jam in And and to be clear they re not coy about this They re fairly explicit about it Stephen Miller especially is speaking in these kind of Marshall terms These we re gonna come get them I mean again very sort of generic milquetoast George Soros funded liberal groups as terrorists which anyone on the left would obviously smirk at because these Ford Foundation and Soros Foundation they largely exist to for want of a better term co-op the left to sort of bring it into the partisan chum machine They re not there to promote extremism Billionaires don t typically promote extremism as a rule It s all rather goofy but really what they want to do is they want to get rid of any partisan opposition And so that s why they ve been working to gut the administrative and liberal state since they came into office Obviously Musk did this under the pretense of DOGE What this administration is doing and what they ve done from the beginning unlike the first time which was obviously far more restrained by other elements they continue to test the fence right Like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park They re testing the fence to see what they can get away with repeatedly over and over and over again And even someone who s as jaded and as cynical as I am is surprised by how utterly weak and facile the liberal state has been in opposing Trump The courts especially which are supposed to be this kind of bulwark against authoritarianism have mostly kind of rolled over with selected notable exceptions and kind of let him do what he wants to do The opposition from Democrats in Congress they are sleepy Remember when Trump called Jeb Bush low potency Jeb They re low power Hakeem Jeffries and low strength Chuck Schumer They don t really seem like they re up to the task They have people like David Shor in their ear telling them just focus on the business sector And it s like yeah that s generally true but also like we should also focus on the authoritarian takeover that he s planting It s kind of urgent and by the way it polls well too if you frame it the right way JW You know what you mentioned in terms of the lack of opposition and you wrote about this a little bit a lot about this in your piece You stated This increasingly goofy harassment campaign would be bad enough if it weren t married to tremendous state power And I guess do you think the kind of goofy nature of the Trump administration of Trump in general do you think that hides what he s really doing Or do you think that the media and the Democratic kind of larger apparatus is secure to hide behind the goofy nature of what he s doing AJ Well I suppose what I meant by goofy in that context although they are goofy and to certain extent is I mean again going after NFL teams for not doing a Charlie Kirk moment of silence that you have these right-wing forces that smell blood they smell weakness and they re going after everyone who doesn t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning I mean again people throw the F-word I think kind of lightly but this is a feature of fascism which is absence of deference and absence of humiliation and obsequiousness rituals is itself seen as suspect So if you re not towing the line and doing the obligatory kind of Ezra Klein mopey-left left flagellation piece like we all need to do better the left is partly responsible for this If you don t run through these kind of motions of venerizing Kirk as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out right Ezra Klein wrote this word piece on Charlie Kirk and didn t once authentically quote any Charlie Kirk words And there s a reason for that because he wasn t the person he was making him out to be But if you don t go through this veneration process This kind of faux morning I mean they were baseball games They were doing moments of silence right In the Bronx Like what does that have to do with anything Again you know people die every day right School children people in the Bronx are killed in gun violence none of that merits this kind of response And this is all again pursuant to an effort to kind of this situation There s no way that this group of people right there s no way that Stephen Miller and JD Vance these demagogues these ideologues to a great extent are going to let an opportunity like this pass up And so I suppose what I meant by goofy harassment campaign is that it took on an element of organic vigilantism that was working with the White House which is unprecedented I mean people want to talk about particular of the vigilante elements of MeToo or post-George Floyd or people were getting fired for this or that comment And we can talk about maybe chosen of the methods in which that was not necessarily rigorous but it was never in a million years backed by the White House It was never backed by the Department of Justice It was never backed by the U S Treasury Department and the Secretary of State I mean these are and this all started again with the Secretary of State working with Canary Mission a shadowy Zionist group that has been trying to get people fired and doxed for several years now Now they re embedded in the state apparatus Canary Mission was how they decided who to deport who to rip away from their families who to put in jail for months on end And you see this combination of brownshirtism which is what these vigilante doxing efforts are Going after random nobodies There s people with million followers posting the names of the wife of a Texas Roadhouse manager in Boca Raton Florida JW Yeah I remember you mentioning that AJ Right So these are nobodies This is not any one of relative import And they built this list of as of Monday it was names I m sure the list is a hundred thousand And they kept moving the goalposts It started off with oh these are people that made light of or supported the killing of Charlie Kirk And then it was people who were mean to him Well OK And then it was people who misattributed a quote And it s like well the goalpost has to keep moving because what they realized very early on is that despite what JD Vance kept insisting and kept insinuating in his three hour demagogue fest when he hosted Charlie s Kirk show on Monday that there s no one in the media who made light of Charlie Kirk killing Nobody No publication ran anything that did that So what they had to do is they have to go do what s called nut picking right This is kind of the Bernie bro formula of find a random person who supports you and then say look you re responsible for this random person online The left the sort of George Soros Foundation the Nation magazine all these sort of left people are responsible for like a random Texas Roadhouse manager I mean it s absurd And then you go into this demagogue cloud of rhetoric and then the person listening says Oh my God the media the quote unquote media is making light of Charlie Kirk s death or supporting it because they don t make a distinction Vice President Vance did the exact same thing the week prior when he claimed that the media explained that Trump was on his deathbed The media never revealed that It was just random shit-posters on Twitter And so here you have this idea that there s inevitably this dark unnamed ill-defined left-wing conspiracy out to get them and then that there justifies their state clampdowns The response from a lot of leftists and liberals is to say you re hypocritical Here s JD Vance saying you shouldn t fire people for their speech two years ago Here s Elon Musk saying you shouldn t fire people for their speech on Twitter four years ago It s like yeah they know they re hypocritical They don t care They re complete nihilists They just care about one thing and that s power And they will turn on a dime with the supposed free speech which is why everyone knew in and all the free speech stuff from the right was bullshit Of unit it was inconsistent Of program they didn t care Of program it was just because they were tired of being called racist and being called sex pests Right JW I think what you re saying about power is really essential That what we re talking about is you know the Trump administration is throwing all of this language about hate speech and who they re going to go after And in specific strategies it feels silly but it s also very real and it s real to them clearly I wrote about this in February and it still feels really applicable now but I get this sense from the Trump administration that what they believe is that the role of authorities is to protect the American constituents in this really narrowly defined way which to then means white Christian conservatives AJ Yes JW And so also what we re seeing to me is also an effort to normalize the really extreme form of anti-Blackness that Charlie Kirk practiced and kind of punish those who call that out What do you think both about how the Trump administration perceives their role and then also specifically with Charlie Kirk s anti-Blackness and the normalization of that AJ Yeah I mean when conservatism such as it is when it morphs into and its popular domain perhaps again I think there s more systematic forces of capital at work here but in its kind of popular domain it is literally devoid of any coherent intellectualism It is literally just triggering the libs and putting bisexual baristas at Starbucks that you envision in your head and uppity Black women who you have as a manager at your shitty email job in the suburbs putting them in their place is the entire animating force of conservative media and has been since the rise of Trump And obviously you have anti-immigration as well When you see them talk When you see them discuss these things when you hear Elon Musk talk about it there s this idea that the white man was displaced He was removed from his pedestal It s the majority manifested in terms of gender It s a hatred of women But then when you have the kind of double whammy of a Black woman then that visceral hatred is so raw and so real and traffics so well I mean and you see this with the whole Cracker Barrel dust up which I think in particular means again speaking of goofy that this really portended I think this latest effort because they would invariably talk about it and then post this picture of selected woman with glasses who looked like this avatar of woke and political correctness and the whole thing was so fucking dumb As if these financing banks give a shit about social justice They were just trying to appeal to younger demographics But their whole world is animated by this idea that there s these globalist forces they traffic in anti-Semitic tropes a lot that are conspiring with sort of high status Black people and high status women to remove you from your position And I m not again I m not saying anything particularly novel here but you see the strategies in which when you point that out with someone like Charlie Kirk it does not comport with the facts And you see that Kirk is a smart businessman Although he is astro-turfed by billionaire and multimillionaire Republican donors he knows full well where the base is going And he knows that this kind of going after MLK day trying to be edgy or trying to be more raw And this is an element of we ve seen in conservative media accelerated under Trump which is how edgy can you be How politically incorrect politically incorrect it can be And when that becomes your animating force and then of module sort of marries with this idea that you re going to preserve the white Christian man in more explicit terms that you lose all pretense like you did say under the Bush years where like I mean go back and watch the Republican National Convention and it is an alien party I think the fundamental forces remain similar remain the same but the options in which it speaks and talks about things like racism like the way it talks about what the vision for society is It used to be certain modicum selected patina of moral vision of like Black entrepreneurship right It was horseshit but at least it was something that felt inclusive JW They pretended AJ They pretended And now they don t even pretend it s just raw white nationalist power And maybe if you re lucky if you re like South Asian or you re sort of a polite Black person you know maybe they ll let you in the club as a kind of token But broadly speaking that s their entire animating force at work And the whole administration s been staffed with these nutters which just wasn t the incident in the first Trump administration And you know this because you know my wife s a reporter for Workday Magazine and she repeatedly will send questions to the EPA or send questions to OSHA or send questions to the labor department And the responses you get are batshit insane They are like Trump was elected by the people JW Yup AJ These unelected bureaucrats and liberal journalists trying to do blah blah blah And you re like oh like this is no longer even remotely a civil servant They ve replaced everyone with people that are in this cult People say it s a cult of personality It s not It s a cult it s a cult of power And whether that avatar is Trump or whether it s Vance who s of module who s seamlessly stepping into the role as demagogue in chief and is far more sophisticated than Trump it is about power and it s about the punishment of enemies And you re seeing that on display here in a way that is going to be so overreaching and so overarching And they are going to their allies in Congress and they re working on passing laws that means the judges to the extent to which they provide any check to this power grab will basically be null and void And the Kirk killing and the disciplining of liberal media post that and again all the sort of mopey like well we need to do better kind of nonsense people do to fill space that is being exploited to push through these preexisting agendas Which again I know the Intercept has stated a lot on it specifically the nonprofit killer bill JW Yeah AJ Which saw a lot of backing last November during the lame duck session and then they tried to bring back in May but it was killed But I m pretty convinced they re going to take another swing at this thing along with other power grabs Again you have Marco Rubio who wants to take away people s passports based entirely on their American citizens based entirely on their ideological so-called assistance of terrorism whatever as Marco Rubio unilaterally deems fit They re coming and they re coming hard for these groups and they re going to come hard for the liberal nonprofits who will not be safe And you saw this with a lot of the approaches universities responded to these authoritarian bullying campaigns There s one thing I know about Trump is he knows how to size up weakness JW Yeah AJ He sees weakness in the liberal institutions and he knows how to exploit it As does Stephen Miller as does their group of -year-old Adderall fueled fucking Heritage Foundation interns who are all hardcore believers is that people are looking to cover their own ass and their own institution s ass And they say OK well I ll compromise here I ll just compromise here and he ll leave us alone Break JW Thinking about narrative control and I m thinking specifically media the industry that we re in On Monday President Donald Trump filed a billion defamation suit against the New York Times for their reporting on him And to me it seems like the president was likely emboldened by his success suing Paramount earlier this year AJ Correct JW Where the company agreed to pay him million to settle a dispute over a Minutes interview that he felt was unfairly favorable to his opponent vice President Kamala Harris I guess my question is why do you think Trump is dropping this lawsuit now AJ It s a power play He knows that if you sue these media companies just like when you sue universities it s leverage You have leverage over them to get other things from them It s not about the money The money doesn t even go to him right And what Trump has realized is that there s no such thing as a unified liberal or left institutional system in place There s no cohesion And this is what happens when your institutions get increasingly taken over by mercenaries PR agents and lawyers as the Democratic Party and multiple of their institutions have is that they don t have any sense of solidarity There s no coordination between anything Everybody s looking for their own ass And it s like what you know Picard says about the Borg they invade this planet We retreat they invade this planet We retreat You know the line must be drawn here and there s no sense that there s ever a line drawn anywhere You know occasionally you ll get particular pushback You ll get maybe a big lofty op-ed piece in the New York Times But what he understands is that these institutions since the liberal institutions got divorced from labor in particular they don t really have any muscle They don t have any ideologues They don t have any socialist in their tent anymore These institutions at their top echelons are run by people in inhabitants relations They re run by pollsters they re run by mercenaries they re run by lawyers They re run by people who have no institutional sort of pedigree in solidarity as a concept And so he knows he can keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away And unfortunately I believe he s wagered correctly And the only meaningful bulwark one can hope is that the liberal state such as it is the sort of deference to the rule of law is at least something whether it be the courts or separation of powers with respect to the states or specific of these governors that are standing up here and there I mean that s pretty much the big hope And you saw it You saw it when he tried to bring in the National Guard to Chicago and Brandon Johnson and JB Pritzker informed him to jump in a lake and he balked Like all bullies he presumably is a paper tiger The dilemma is there s very little coherent again aside from these blue state governors really there s not really coherent opposition to Trump in any meaningful sense And I think that s what people are looking for And I think that s why your kind of random MSNBC-aunt has become so radicalized in the last six months because they re seeing that Again I mean the responses from the two preponderance powerful Democrats in the Senate whether it s Trump bombing Iran whether it s Trump going after Gaza protestors they re just sleeping through this There s these lukewarm statements that come out There s again all this language around compromise and bipartisanship And they re just not up to the task Because again I think that these institutions have become so atomized and so disparate that there s no sense that they have any shared stakes here And he knows this so he is just picking off people one by one JW Yeah no I think that s really stimulating I think about it a lot I live in D C I think about it a lot in the D C context thinking about how we saw Mayor Muriel Bowser continuously capitulate to Trump Obviously we saw Columbia University I mean pretty much everyone who has laid down has suffered But I want to get back to Paramount because there s a lot obviously that s happening with them They ve been the center of a lot of conflict Last month regulators approved the merger of Skydance Media founded by billionaire Larry Ellison s son David Ellison and Paramount Global which owns CBS in a highly criticized move After the merger CBS canceled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert who had obviously been an outspoken critic of the president Paramount is also reportedly in talks to purchase the Free Press and install its founder conservative media commentator Bari Weiss as the editorial advisor for CBS What do you make of the direction CBS is going and do you think it says anything more broadly about the media landscape AJ Yeah I mean look you know David Ellison is someone who donates millions of dollars to the IDF Israel Defense Forces When he revealed his purchase of or his attempt to purchase Paramount a year ago he put out a press release in the Jerusalem Post saying that this was going to be good for Israel It s not his only motive He obviously as a conservative has other ideological preferences but clearly one of the motivators here is that Israel s losing the PR battle You look at Israel s assistance among people under the age of it basically doesn t exist especially among Democrats Jewish people in the United States below the age of almost uniformly say it s a genocide not uniformly but overwhelmingly say it s a genocide And overwhelmingly we don t care about Israel They are losing the PR battle Everybody knows this You can t commit a genocide in K in and without losing assistance So you know the effort is I think largely just to kind of control the narrative more The Ellison family is buying TikTok They re buying CBS and they re buying CNN That s a lot of media right there And obviously you have MSNBC kind of shedding its liberal appearance It fired its you know primary pro Gaza personality Joy-Ann Reid And she says explicitly it was over Gaza So I think part of the goal is from these mega billionaire pro-Israel media owners is to just control the narrative I mean they re quite open about it You know Shari Redstone who owned CBS prior to that who authentically sold it to the Ellison family herself was a funder for the IDF And herself intervened twice on behalf of Israel scolding Minutes to the extent to which longtime producer Bill Owens left over that And Minutes is really what they want Minutes is considered a gold standard of journalism So if you can have minutes produce a bunch of stories about you know Hamas sleeper cells in Columbia University and human shields over hospitals or whatever kind of nonsense and give it the kind of veneer of serious journalism I mean that s what Jeffrey Goldberg did to the Atlantic right It s again another former IDF prison guard who turned the Atlantic Magazine into a totally one-note pro-Israel propaganda rag You lend it this kind of liberal veneer this credible veneer and that s ultimately what you re paying for And so people have framed Ellison s takeover as a kind of pro-Trump thing and it s true to an extent but it s also very much about helping Israel finish out its genocide over the next year or two in Gaza and then eventually the annexing of the West Bank as a kind of ideological project which is why you hire Bari Weiss Bari Weiss is not a journalist They keep referring to her as a journalist I mean name me one piece of journalism Bari Weiss has done that s notable or credible Can you do it I can t It doesn t exist because she s not a journalist She like me is a pundit and that s fine I m a pundit I tell people at parties I m a pundit I have no shame in that But I m not a journalist and neither is she JW Yeah AJ She does not produce journalism The Free Press does not produce journalism It produces commentary and demagoguery and genocide denial first and foremost If you use the math of subscribers which they allegedly are worth to million My guess is that The Intercept would be worth about a hundred million dollars And I think we can all agree that there s no one willing to buy The Intercept for million dollars JW Not that I know of AJ Obviously this is an artificial valuation Obviously it s to bring in Bari Weiss to take the CBS news brand and turn it into a Zionist propaganda rag Ellison also wants to buy Warner Brothers which is CNN Again it s not like these things don t make money on their own anyway but if you can have an ideological play toy and buy the brand because ultimately you re just buying the brand right you re buying the name and turn it into your own ideological play toy then that s what you do Because if I have you know billion what s billion to me It s nothing It s pocket change It s going to align with other things that benefit people like the Ellisons in terms of low taxes I m sure they ll do stuff against labor I mean name it But the thing is that CBS had institutional power CBS News had institutional power within Paramount Minutes especially had institutional power People that worked in there for decades and even if you craved to they were hard to purge And it s very clear you bring in Bari Weiss to do that to purge out the sort of last vestiges of independence Again Minutes is already not good Minutes already has David Simon doing Pentagon press releases and you know denied U S participation in the mass killing in Yemen in and I ve written about this but so they re already not great But like everything in the Trump era you take things that are already bad and you make them much much worse And you say oh well look at that It got worse And I think that s the gambit here The gambit is to take Trump aligned billionaires and then you add on the extra layer of helping propagandize on behalf of Israel and trying to sort of recalibrate community opinion in favor of genocide You own TikTok CBS and you re halfway there really Within six months to nine months we ll be getting all sorts of stories about you know Hamas sleeper cells inside of the Intercept JW Laughs AJ I mean whatever I mean I m not even joking I mean this is the kind of schlock that the Free Press pumps out And this is the kind of schlock he wants to That s why you buy this stuff And again this is by his own statements Skydance published a press release in the Jerusalem Post saying this was what s going to happen They didn t phrase it in those sinister terms They disclosed like good for Israel you know blah blah blah But it s basically what he s doing And so you know that is obviously very very ominous because our liberal institutions and I m writing a book on this to be published in March about the failures of liberal media so-called liberal media or center left media you know MSNBC CNN NBC ABC CBS not the failures I would say the sort of deliberate attempt to help and The New York Times et cetera to promote the genocide in Gaza But there was reliably this kind of liberal veneer This kind of liberal performance of objectivity And I think we re sort of just going to see that more and more go away We re going to get this more overt kind of cartoon propaganda that is not very sophisticated but I think what people realize is that it still kind of works as long as it has this sort of trappings of real journalism And again this is what the Free Press is I mean the Free Press published a story about the myth of famine in Gaza in May of and then turns around in July of once these images started to appear these horrific images of emaciated children saying authentically there s starvation but it s not that bad So you have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina this kind of veneer of universalism and everything is just about the exercise of raw power the exercise of pure racist propaganda So yeah look things are bad But I think what we ve learned is that they can get worse One could make the argument that OK well once this sort of liberal veneer is erased from a lot of this performance can we have a discussion about what it means for the left such as it is to have power What does it mean to exercise power Why are we unfailingly the one to defer to the referees Why are we constantly the ones to refer to the parliamentarians Why are they inevitably the ones to act like you know oh sorry there s certain mysterious rule we can t do it You know maybe at the very least this could invite a conversation about what it means to live in a world where one side cares deeply about power and the other side cares deeply about playing by the rules And those are two totally different criteria for success JW Yeah And I want to Obviously I have heard on this podcast things are bad but things are about to get a lot worse multiple times and it never gets any less scary But one question I did have kind of on the media power grab from the billionaire class that you ve been talking about that you ve been writing about that I think is really essential I mean do you think we can put the alleged firing of Karen Attiah from the Washington Post within that kind of larger billionaire class power grab AJ Yes percent This is literally I m surprised she lasted that long to be honest JW Mm-hmm AJ I think back in February when Jeff Bezos published that open letter saying he was going to aid patriotism and free markets you know very thinly veiled codes for here s our new right-wing ideology both to sort of suck up to Trump but also I mean again he s worth billion You don t really have to twist a guy s arm hard who is worth billion to be a right-wing racist right That was the position they were going and they brought in editors from The Economists you know a kind of pseudo highbrow right-wing rag and that was the direction they were taking I know you know people like Perry Bacon left who again we re familiar with and lived within the milieu of progressive politics There was a reason why he did it in February of You know billionaires are good at adapting to the winds They were never going to be liberal or God forbid left or anything like that But under Biden they kind of knew where the political winds were and they played ball And now once Trump takes office then everyone can sort of drop the act You know Zuckerberg doesn t have to act like he wants to be your friend and do these bullshit little world tours Once Trump takes office a second time everyone can say oh ultimately I can just kind of come out as a right-winger And you saw that And you know it s like with the Columbia stuff People kept referring to Columbia as capitulation with respect to Trump But look a lot of those things that they supported were things that the administrators and the donors and the deans they yearned to promotion anyway To a few extent I feel like a lot of these wealthy center center-left types like Bezos like Gates like the you know Columbia donors they don t necessarily agree with the far-right everything in the far right agenda especially all the kind of red meat stuff but they believe that Trump is useful in disciplining their mutual enemies A Gaza protestors B the sort of woke left the nonprofit types who they thought got way too big for their britches post George Floyd And they desired to instrumentalize Trump to go after their mutual enemies That s what they re doing So like yes are they capitulating Are they bending the knee To an extent but I think one doesn t want to overplay that dynamic I think that a lot of people in the ruling class again this is why he raised more money from the Republican Party in raised more money from billionaires than Democrats did I think they know that they can use Trump to their own ends They can use it to gut the federal ruling body They can use it of program to lower taxes They can use it to bloat the military all kinds of typical Republican stuff He does it he just does it with a little bit of vulgarity that they had to kind of distance themselves from but ultimately like they believe that he can be instrumentalized to discipline their mutual enemies and I think a lot of those on the fence don t necessarily realize that they re not going to stop at just mutual enemies They re going to keep going And this is I think where you do see this bend the knee element more and more where it s like oh well they re going to just keep going and going They re going after you know when they mentioned they were gonna go after immigrants they were being sincere JW Yeah AJ I mean again look at tariffs like something that nobody like majority of of the ruling class does not encouragement tariffs The Wall Street Journal doesn t like them The U S Chamber of Commerce hates them but Trump does them because he ideologically believes in it He also has this weird thing where he treats politics like he s playing a encounter of Jeopardy Like it s very weird right Take over Greenland It s absurd But to the extent to which they will indulge the ridiculousness of what Trump does because he s so effective at snuffing out the mutual enemies of labor of the left of nonprofit people of these left-wing constituents who the ruling class uniformly hates Environmentalists you know circumstances change activists you name it Everyone s running around putting out fires No one s got time to protest Jeff Bezos anymore So it s like yeah it s a little bit of capitulation but I think that can be overstated I also think Trump ultimately idiosyncrasies around tariffs and stuff aside he largely percent just carries out the wishes of the very rich in this country and they ll deal with the other weird psychodrama around that So if they can you know get rid of the Color of Change and Palestinian Youth Movement and all these groups that give them a big fucking headache that they don t like that s what they ll do JW And I want to ask about the role of the media We tend to be really careful about how we re perceived Majority of of us who call ourselves journalists but even those who call ourselves pundits depending on how you see yourself we don t want to seem biased or emotional or angry or insensitive Objectivity is this really core tenant of our industry But do we have what it takes to meet this moment with all of that kind of fear and anxiety and all the things that we have that hold us back AJ You know the thing with objectivity because obviously I gave up on that a long time ago I think it exists because we have this broad sense of credibility Look back at how George W Bush promoted the Iraq war in They needed the New York Times to encouragement that They needed the New York Times to vindicate that and validate that And to a great extent Biden needed the New York Times to vindicate his patronage for genocide and Gaza You need these kind of institutional markers to give it validation What organizations like the New York Times and to particular extent MSNBC and CNN do is they police and gate keep the sort of acceptable left-wing pole of the country And I think that so multiple tools and so much time and so much effort went into disciplining the left-wing pole there was no one watching the right side And Republicans were so well funded and so good at working the refs and using objectivity against itself and ideological and intellectual cul-de-sac of like liberal fact-check-ism And you saw this during the first Trump administration And I think there s a place for that stuff I don t necessarily think it s categorically bad but it s just not sufficient It s not enough And when the party and the institutions and I m obviously speaking in generalities one can take it or leave it when they spent so much of their time policing the left-wing flank disciplining the left-wing flank snuffing it out making sure it didn t achieve any electoral success removing it from any of its publications right then there s not going to be a meaningful counterbalance because then it s like well what is the project I m getting behind here And that s why you had this kind of zombie-liberalism over the past five-six years that the only thing you could really offer was to say We re not Trump And that s a perfectly fine thing to offer In fact I think we ve seen very well that it s better than Trump Right But it s not a counter narrative It s not a counter moral vision for the world It doesn t really offer a better future offer anything to replace that right-wing dark doomy populism And so this is all a very lofty way of saying I think yes the fetish for objectivity the fetish for neutrality has shown how impotent it is because again if the other side doesn t need that like Bush need ed the New York Times in once the other side ceases to care about those validators And again when you alienate your muscle when you alienate your youth when you alienate your canvassers when you alienate labor when you alienate environmental groups when you alienate LGBTQ groups repeatedly just sort of brushing off telling them to fuck off triangulating we ll deal with you guys later you have no choice but to vote for us vote scolding then yeah like naturally you re not going to have the muscle to push back in these moments And obviously I have an ideological agenda to say that as someone who fits within that orientation But I genuinely think it s true I think that when you fetishize objectivity and neutrality in this kind of high-minded liberalness that stuff works within a particular system within a particular domain of applicability But once that domain is no longer that central especially to the other side then you re just shadow boxing And I think the way that they work the refs around the Charlie Kirk killing to circle back to our initial topic just shows how feeble that is Like when you have the New York Times bulk influential podcaster having Ben Shapiro on and having these mopey apologies tours about how mean the left has been to the right I want to pull my fucking hair out I m like what are you talking about This is not the issue at hand man A because all that stuff about preemptively apologizing even before we knew who the killer was you re implicitly saying we take ownership of this killing when we don t even know what the guy s politics were For all we know he seems rather incoherent He s steeped in internet practices But preemptively all these major liberal outlets were implicitly taking ownership of the killing And I m like why would you do that You think the right would ever do that Nancy Pelosi s husband was beaten with a fucking hammer And you know what they did They spent a week making fun of him And like again you have this totally one-sided battle that they are doing gorilla tactics And we are lining up in our red coats with our bayonets in formation And we wonder why we get smoked every time And it s like because you re just playing by a different set of rules JW Yeah Adam we re going to leave it there but thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing This was a really insightful conversation and I m so glad that you were able to share with us AJ Yes Thank you for having me on to rant JW Laughs We appreciated the rant That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing We want to hear from you Share your story 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