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Net Neutrality Repeal Is Only Part of Trump's Surrender to Corporate Media |
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Saturday, 16 December 2017 09:24 |
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Richardson writes: "The FCC is under attack-and so too is the First Amendment. As the primary regulator of how media and information gets to our nation's citizens, the Federal Communications Commission has a critical role to play in protecting the open Internet, free speech, and free press in our democracy."
President Donald Trump speaking on the phone. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Net Neutrality Repeal Is Only Part of Trump's Surrender to Corporate Media
By Reed Richardson, FAIR
16 December 17
 he FCC is under attack—and so too is the First Amendment. As the primary regulator of how media and information gets to our nation’s citizens, the Federal Communications Commission has a critical role to play in protecting the open Internet, free speech, and free press in our democracy. Though the agency has always enjoyed a cozy relationship with the industries it regulates, ever since the Trump administration arrived in Washington, the FCC’s mission to preserve the public commons has been threatened, assaulted and torn asunder. And like a bad horror movie cliché, these calls to eviscerate the FCC have been coming from inside the agency.
Repealing net neutrality has drawn a huge amount of public visibility—and rightly so—but that decision is just the latest in a string of ominous, industry-friendly giveaways by the Trump administration’s FCC. It has also rolled back local TV station ownership limits on media giants like Sinclair Broadcasting Group and rescinded the longtime “main studio” rule that required local stations to maintain community newsrooms and fostered more local journalism. And the agency’s leadership has begun a campaign to actively abdicate its enforcement mission and pass it over to the smaller, less well-funded Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which lacks the FCC’s deep industry knowledge and proactive regulatory power.
“This is the worst FCC I can remember,” says Michael Copps, bluntly. Copps, who served as FCC commissioner from 2001 to 2011 and now advises Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, says he has watched new FCC chair Ajit Pai’s leadership with growing alarm. “There’s an audacity to it, a lack of process. It’s just God-awful,” Copps says of the agency’s breakneck pursuit of a reactionary, “market-based” agenda. “This FCC is on an outright tear to wreak untold damage on our media ecosystem, on our news and information, free speech, democracy and self-government.”
Death of the Open Internet?
The FCC’s 3–2 vote to repeal net neutrality—with the two Democratic commissioners dissenting—is the most high-profile and controversial step the agency has taken in the Trump era. It reverses a rule passed by the Obama administration FCC in February 2015 that put internet traffic under the “Common Carrier” protections of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. In effect, net neutrality means the government prohibits cable companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking, slowing or otherwise discriminating against the web traffic of their users. Much like a public utility, all content to the consumer must be treated the same—hence, net neutrality. Right-wing opponents of the rule—which included then-Commissioner Pai, who voted against net neutrality—complained it was a case of unnecessary government overreach, and made a series of apocalyptic claims about its potential impact.
“One of the things that’s really outlandish about how this FCC has gone about its net neutrality proceeding is that Pai has just straight-up ignored all the available evidence of the impact of the rule,” explains Craig Aaron, president and CEO of the media industry watchdog group Free Press:
Net neutrality opponents talked about how internet infrastructure will suffer. But if you actually look at what the phone and cable companies are reporting to their own investors since 2015: They’re bragging about deployment, they’re talking about all the faster speeds they’re providing, they’re talking about doing more with less money.
In endorsing a return to the “light touch” status quo ante—which is itself a misreading of the agency’s regulatory history—Pai cites studies that show a slight dip in broadband investment since 2015. But that proof is notably funded by the telecom industry, and other reporting on companies like Comcast contradicts his claims. So, like the widespread passage of draconian voter ID laws to combat a nonexistent epidemic of vote fraud, the Trump administration FCC’s justification for killing net neutrality is a right-wing “solution” to a phony problem. Aaron chalks up this FCC’s unwillingness to accept the truth as proof they don’t really care about consumers or the public interest. “To them, it really comes down to regulation is bad, and regulations passed by the Obama administration are worse.”
Even if motivated by partisan spite, the impact of losing net neutrality could be devastating for all news consumers and a free and independent press. With no legal or regulatory prohibitions stopping them, telecom companies and ISPs would feel emboldened—spurred on by their shareholders—to start picking and choosing one kind of content over another to maximize profits.
Coincidentally, on the same day Pai announced his plan to roll back net neutrality last April, Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company and the owner of NBCUniversal, was caught subtly changing the language of its online net neutrality pledge. Before, the company promised to never offer “paid prioritization” (fast lanes) of Internet traffic; now it merely said it would not engage in “anti-competitive prioritization.” That vague, legalistic language amounts to a semi truck-sized loophole, ripe for abuse.
“There’s just so much incentive for a Comcast, which owns all these channels and movie studios, to give their own content a leg up and they can do it in ways that, as an end user, you might not know what’s going on,” Aaron points out.
For example, you might try to watch a Democracy Now! broadcast and you get that spinning wheel of death. It’s not loading, so unless you’re really committed to seeing it, you’ll probably go somewhere else, like NBC News, that loads quicker. That’s the kind of advantage they want. It’s like a big horserace, except they own the track and can give themselves a head start, and even if it’s only a few seconds in load time or a certain percentage in quality difference, that’s a big deal.
The backlash to the repeal has been ferocious. Just between Pai’s announcement in April and the end of August, the FCC received nearly 22 million public comments about the rule change. Most of these comments opposed the repeal: a Pew analysis found six out of the seven most prevalent comments supported net neutrality. And public polling also finds a majority of Americans prefer to keep net neutrality.
There was also a large-scale campaign of fraudulent FCC comments using 1 million stolen identities, which the FCC is refusing to help investigate. On the day before the repeal, 18 state attorney generals went public with a letter calling on Pai to delay the vote until the million-plus fraudulent public comments could be properly investigated.
Part of the overwhelming response can be attributed to comedian John Oliver, whose May segment in support of net neutrality went viral and has garnered more than 6 million views online. But the resistance runs far deeper than that.
An open letter signed by more than 50 mayors of US cities, from New York City to Salem, Virginia, called on the FCC to abandon its repeal. On the same day Michael Flynn pleaded guilty, the entire front page of Reddit was devoted to supporting net neutrality and expressing outrage at industry-funded lawmakers who failed to support it. (Even in the r/NASCAR subreddit, the most upvoted story ever is now about the need to protect net neutrality.) Members of Congress have been deluged with calls and comments as well. During the week of Thanksgiving, Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley reported 4,204 constituent calls supporting net neutrality, 0 against. Even the “father of the Internet,” Vint Cerf, and numerous other tech leaders have spoken out in support of net neutrality.
“Net neutrality has become a new third rail,” Aaron says. “This is very much a political issue now.” Despite the broad grassroots opposition, not to mention the unanswered questions about the legitimacy of some of the FCC comments, Pai and his fellow Republicans on the commission pushed ahead and voted to end net neutrality anyway.
Gutting Big Media Accountability
“What Pai is doing is moving us to an anti-competitive, ‘pay to play’ system of the internet, one that makes it harder for citizen journalists who have a camera or a phone to report and compete with big media companies,” explains Phillip Berenbroick, senior policy counsel for the open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge. And a mostly overlooked element of this plan, Berenbroick adds, is Pai’s push to strip the FCC of its regulatory and enforcement duties.
“In effect, the FCC is trying to dump enforcement of the Internet onto the FTC, which is already overtaxed,” Berenbroick explains. Pai justifies this move as a step toward more accountability, and he often calls the FTC, which oversees everything from diapers to airlines, the “nation’s premier civil law enforcement agency.” This tough talk is just a ruse, however, and glosses over the fundamental weaknesses inherent in dumping the FCC’s enforcement responsibilities onto another agency. Even FTC commissioner Terrell McSweeny acknowledged back in April that his agency would not be as capable as the FCC at policing internet blocking or tiered-content prioritization.
First of all, Berenbroick points out that the FTC lacks deep institutional knowledge of the communications industry, making it unlikely to effectively deal with technical or legal issues that could lead to anti-competitive behavior by massive media corporations. The agency also has roughly 550 fewer employees than the FCC, and Trump has just proposed cutting its fiscal year 2018 budget to $306 million, $16 million less than the FCC’s.
Most importantly, the FTC can only enforce “unfair and deceptive trade practices.” In effect, it can only police companies after the fact for failing to live up to their own voluntary commitments. With legions of lawyers at their disposal, giant media corporations are unlikely to be swayed by consumer complaints of internet traffic discrimination when these same companies are able to write (and rewrite) the rules they’re supposed to follow.
Of course, the Trump FCC’s abdication of its regulatory duties is not surprising. One of Trump’s early telecom policy advisors, Mark Jamison, talked openly about eliminating the agency during last year’s presidential transition period. Just weeks before Trump’s election, Jamison had written an op-ed for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, not-so-subtly titled: “Do We Need the FCC?” (Of note: Jamison previously advised cell phone corporation Sprint on regulatory issues.) In the post, Jamison claims one reason the FCC is no longer necessary is that “telecommunications network providers and ISPs are rarely, if ever, monopolies.” In fact, Pai’s predecessor, former FCC chair Tom Wheeler, pointed out in 2014 that four out of five Americans had only one choice for an ISP at basic broadband speeds of 25Mbps.
“The FCC, as the expert regulator of the communications industry, is far better positioned to deal with internet regulation, because it has the authority to write rules that prohibit bad behavior from happening in the first place,” Berenbroick notes. “If I were a cable company [Pai’s plan] is exactly what I would want.” For his part, Pai, a former lawyer for telecom giant Verizon, seems unconcerned about the appearance of bias. In fact, at a telecom industry dinner last week—hosted by Sinclair—the FCC chair joked about his “love” of his former company.
Wheeler, who led the fight to pass net neutrality, has likewise criticized the FCC’s efforts to dump enforcement on the FTC, calling it an “abomination.” In an op-ed last week, Wheeler noted the irony of such a move, since telecom giant AT&T recently won a court case where it successfully argued that the FTC had no jurisdiction over its internet traffic activity.
Sensing the fury aimed at this naked surrender to industry, Pai released a joint Memorandum of Understanding just two days before the repeal about how the FCC and FTC would work together to monitor the internet. But the substance of the plan was little changed; it was little more than a blatant attempt at damage control. Democratic FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn blasted it as a “confusing, lackluster, reactionary afterthought.” The repeal vote still happened, however. Because in the Trump era FCC, the prospect that multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates could fall through the cracks, and their online control over the nation’s news and information could go essentially unregulated, is more a feature than a bug.
Undermining Local Journalism
The damage wrought by this FCC doesn’t stop with repealing net neutrality, though. As that more public battle has raged, the agency quietly gutted media ownership rules last month, opening the door to even more local TV consolidation, which could have a catastrophic impact on news diversity and local journalism. “Net neutrality has gotten more attention, because consumers can better understand the idea of my Netflix feed slowing down and buffering if I don’t pay Verizon more for video streaming,” notes University of Delaware public policy professor Danilo Yanich. “But media consolidation suffers because it is an abstract concern for news consumers; it’s hard for viewers to be outraged about the stories your new local TV station doesn’t cover.”
Local TV, which just a few years ago was considered a dying backwater, has become among the hottest properties in the media industry recently. Between 2013 and 2016, the local TV news industry saw more than $20 billion in mergers and acquisitions deals, with hundreds of stations changing hands. As a result, several dominant players, among them Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar, have emerged. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of BIA Kelsey data, by the time 2017 arrived, five companies owned 37 percent of all full-power local TV stations in the country. This has translated into $2 billion in additional revenue for these companies since 2014.
“The mantra from these big media groups now is ‘go big or go home,’” says Yanich.
Mergers create more leverage for local TV media groups to charge broadcasters and cable companies more money for retransmission. And the reason they can say that is because they now control dozens or hundreds of stations across the country.
But local TV has also turned into a lucrative cash cow thanks to the radically changed landscape of political advertising in the wake of the 2011 Citizens United ruling, he explains. After analyzing the finances of seven major TV station corporations, a Pew report found that their combined political ad revenue jumped from $574 million in 2012 to $696 million in 2014 to $843 million last year. And those numbers are projected to grow even more in the future.
“Local TV news remains an extremely important vehicle for political communication,” Yanich explains. That is, in part, because local journalism is the most trusted form of news. Currently, Yanich is working on a book studying the relationship between political ads and news content in the 2016 election. He notes that this trust factor, plus the fact that local TV reaches a large number of voters who aren’t hardened partisans, makes it an appealing target for political influencers. “So a lot of money will keep going into local TV for political ads in 2020, because that’s the best way to get the message across to these undecided voters.”
Greater media consolidation may be good for the bottom lines of local TV conglomerates, but it’s not good for journalism. “This has huge implications, and it’s going on in the backyards of America, but most folks don’t know it because it’s simply not covered,” Yanich says.
It’s certainly not covered in depth in the mainstream press. It might be covered by FAIR or industry journals, but a local TV station in Philadelphia is certainly not going to tell you about the duopoly it has with another local station. What it instead says is: “We are extending the reach of the primary station.”
That’s why the FCC’s under-the-radar accompanying decision to rescind the “main studio” rule is so damaging. Previously, local TV stations were required to maintain a newsroom in the communities they covered, the goal being to keep their journalism centered on local issues. But with the rule lifted, local TV giants are now free to gobble up more and more stations, and then shut down those newly acquired local newsrooms to pad their profits. They can then pipe in pre-packaged news produced in faraway studios to save even more money. “You end up with the same anchors, same videos, same narrative,” Yanich explains. “Coupled with the move to end net neutrality, more media consolidation will have the effect of squelching dissent, whether for ideological or commercial reasons.”
Indeed, greater local media consolidation will make it much easier to manipulate the news to fit the agenda of a corporate parent. Nowhere is this more apparent than at Sinclair Broadcasting, the largest TV station owner in the country, which has a well-established track record of coloring its news to favor right-wing ideology. A recent example: Back in May, when Montana Republican Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically attacked a reporter on the eve of a special election, the local Sinclair affiliate refused to cover the story, even though numerous other news outlets did and a Fox affiliate witnessed and had an audio recording of the assault. Even more egregious, Sinclair forces its affiliates to run long, pro-Trump commentaries in its news broadcasts as many as nine times a week. Now Sinclair wants to bring this kind of broadcast mindset to even more of the country—in May, it proposed a massive acquisition of the fifth-largest local TV company, Tribune Media, which would give it more than 200 stations nationwide, and broadcast access to three out of four American homes.
The consequences for the homogenization and hollowing out of local and independent news are ominous. “As a viewer in a community, I’m better served if there are multiple newsrooms trying to hold public officials accountable. You want competing sources of information, different viewpoints and voices,” Free Press’s Aaron points out:
But if it’s all under the same corporate roof and literally produced by the same people, you can’t have that. In multiple communities right now, if you’re clicking through on Election Night, your local outlets might be simulcasting the same content on multiple channels.
The Fight Ahead
While this flagrant rollback of media consolidation rules looks unlikely to be reversed anytime soon under the Trump administration, net neutrality stands a better chance of being preserved. The political pressure on Congress to protect Title II internet regulation shows little signs of stopping. And numerous free press and civil liberties groups plan on suing the FCC to temporarily halt and, ultimately, reverse the repeal.
“We think this FCC completely botched the process. It has just ignored the public and never addressed the apparent fraud happening in the comments,” Aaron says. Likewise, the FCC’s public review simply disappeared the more than 50,000 consumer complaints lodged against internet providers since net neutrality went into effect. Notes Aaron:
When it comes to the FCC and administrative law, the fact that there is a new president, in and of itself, is not a winning argument for changing rules. There was a 10-year fight to get net neutrality, and then the decision was upheld in court. So here comes Ajit Pai who says, “Sorry, new sheriff in town, we don’t need any of it.” There’s a legal burden there to prove that. We will sue him, it will go to federal court and we like our chances.
That legal fight could take more than a year to reach a final resolution, almost guaranteeing that net neutrality will be a key campaign issue in the 2018 midterm elections. Republican Sen. John Thune has been at the forefront of this issue, publicly calling for a bipartisan, congressional fix to settle the open internet issue once and for all. Some media giants, like AT&T, have echoed his call for a legislative solution as well. But upon closer inspection, these Republican and corporate definitions of “open internet” would still shortchange consumers and make it harder on the independent press. No Democrats have signed on to sponsor his bill.
“We shouldn’t fall for a compromise that is 5 percent less awful than what the FCC is doing,” Aaron warns:
Senator Thune’s bill codifies basic internet protections, but strips the FCC of any ability to adjust or adapt to new abuses or tactics. It will also prohibit tactics the telecom and media companies don’t have any intention of doing anyway. They will call it “net neutrality,” but it will be a toothless version.
Getting the American public more involved in a real, transparent debate over net neutrality—along with a broader discussion of what kind of media and news environment we want to encourage—is critically important to the future of our country, says former FCC commissioner Copps. And it would stand in stark contrast to Pai’s cloistered approach, where he rarely ventures outside a friendly bubble of conservative think tanks and the airwaves of Fox News to tout his industry-first policies.
“The American people need to know what he wants to do, and he needs to really hear what the American people think,” Copps says of Pai. The former FCC commissioner points to two dark forces at work right now gaining ever greater control over our national discourse: the power of big money and big media, and an extreme, right-wing ideology that thinks an unfettered free market is the cure for all evils.
“We have this technology that has the potential to be the town square of our democracy, but this FCC is setting up fewer and fewer, huge gatekeepers to that,” he says. As a result, cherished ideals like freedom of expression and freedom of the press are now under threat from a Trump administration that prioritizes multinational telecom and corporate media profits above all else. “Big media sees you and me and all the people in the United States not as citizens,” Copps says, “but as products to be delivered to advertisers.”
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Good Riddance to the Biggest Fake in American Politics |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 15 December 2017 13:54 |
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Pierce writes: "Paul Ryan makes noises about going back to Janesville. Ring and run, you wretched cur."
Paul Ryan. (photo: Getty Images)
Good Riddance to the Biggest Fake in American Politics
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
15 December 17
Paul Ryan makes noises about going back to Janesville.
 ing and run, you wretched cur.
In what passes for a genuine scoop, Tim Alberta and Rachael Cade broke the news in Politico on Thursday that Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, may well be hanging them up at the end of the 2018 midterms. Of course, Ryan—and various People Who Are Familiar With His Thinking—has a number of deeply pious, and unquestionably phony, reasons for his departure.
On a personal level, going home at the end of next year would allow Ryan, who turns 48 next month, to keep promises to family; his three children are in or entering their teenage years, and Ryan, whose father died at 55, wants desperately to live at home with them full time before they begin flying the nest.
Isn’t that just too fcking sweet for words? Of course, young Paul Ryan had Social Security survivor’s benefits to live on when his pappy kicked and, once again, you’re welcome, dickhead. And I’m sure that his own children have excellent health care in his magnificent Georgian Revival home back in Janesville. I tell you, I’m almost as moved as I was when Ryan washed some clean pots and pans at that soup kitchen, or those several times when he dropped by impoverished neighborhoods in order to have his picture taken there.
Also, I’m sure that the fact that, in 2018, all indications are that his party will be facing a bloodbath in the midterm elections, and that the abomination of a tax bill that is his crowning achievement will be one of the party’s larger millstones, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Paul Ryan’s giant, if remarkably delicate, intellect suddenly can no longer handle the hurly-burly of everyday politics. Good god, this man could not be a bigger fake if he were made of papier-mâché.
This may be my favorite passage in the Politico account.
As the deciding votes were cast—recorded in green on the black digital scoreboard suspended above the floor—the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together. Soon he was engulfed in a sea of dark suits, every Republican lawmaker wanting to slap him on the shoulder and be a part of his moment.
His moment. Thirteen million Americans lose their health care.
Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment. Eighty-percent of the benefits going to the top one-percent.
Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment. Millions of dollars shoved upwards to people who already have billions of dollars. A deficit entering the orbit of Mercury.
Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
His moment.
Of course, as the piece points out, Ryan may have bigger problems completing the second part of his granny-starving exacta: shredding what’s left of the social safety net.
Reveling in the afterglow, Ryan remarked to several colleagues how this day had proven they could accomplish difficult things—and that next year, they should set their sights on an even tougher challenge: entitlement reform. The speaker has since gone public with this aspiration, suggesting that 2018 should be the year Washington finally tackles what he sees as the systemic problems with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Bear in mind: the “difficult thing” that Ryan accomplished was getting the true lunatics in his caucus to support a tax plan that is the foundation stone of a permanent corporate oligarchy, for which he and all the rest of his pack of vandals will be richly rewarded by the donor class. His biggest job as Speaker was keeping Louie Gohmert and Steve King from running amuck in their underwear. And “what he sees as being systemic problems” with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are that those programs exist at all.
Of course, he tried to do all of this while managing an existential crisis that would have embarrassed the writer’s room of Days of Our Lives.
Ryan nearly walked away from Congress once before. It was November 2012, after Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, and the would-be vice president found himself despondent and homesick. Ryan told his wife, Janna, that he was considering retirement.
Wait a minute. He was running for a job that would have kept him in Washington for eight years—and that would’ve made him the frontrunner for the top job that would’ve kept him there for eight more—but only after he and Mitt Romney lost did he decide that Janesville and his 13 rooms were a’callin’ him home? That dog sleeps on the porch. There are those of us who recall that Ryan was such a flop on the national stage that Joe Biden laughed at him in a debate, and that he couldn’t even carry his home precinct for the ticket.
And no matter how much gauzy nonsense is spun about how reluctant he was to become Speaker, Ryan knew that the only way to maintain his utterly unearned reputation as an intellectual, while simultaneously dismantling everything about government that he opposed at a theological level, was to become the smartest chimp in the monkeyhouse. That was something he did. And now he and his owners have scored their biggest victory. People he doesn’t even know will suffer for years because Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House. People he doesn’t even know may well die because of it. But he has that one happy moment in which Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.
Quite a trick, for an unusually sophisticated marionette.
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FOCUS: The Assault on Mueller |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39611"><span class="small">Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 15 December 2017 12:03 |
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Sullivan writes: "Republican tribalism demands that the Mueller investigation be aggressively smeared in advance, its findings preemptively discredited, and its lawyers smeared for political loyalties, even when there is no evidence that this is affecting the special counsel's work."
Under attack. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Assault on Mueller
By Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine
15 December 17
 atience, I guess. Patience.
On my iPhone, which I’m trying not to look at, I have three sites tucked away to check when I’m having a bad Trump day. There’s the Gallup approval chart, FiveThirtyEight’s poll of polls, and Real Clear Politics’ graphic of Trump polling. They sit there like little squares of visual Xanax whenever the anxiety of living in a country run by a delusional rage-aholic gets a bit too much. And they’re all looking good. Squinting at Nate’s blurry orange and green, it looks to me as if the gulf between approval and disapproval is widening still further. Around 20 points this week. Twenty! RCP — a little less smoothed-out — shows an even starker low. And then Virginia and now Alabama. And the Democratic flood of potential candidates for 2018, especially women. And that moment Drudge (peace be upon him) called “Brokeback Virginia” when the crusty old bigot, Roy Moore, rode in on a horse to his electoral defeat, looking about as comfortable as I would be, perched up there, cowboy boots akimbo. If it weren’t all so tragic, we’d be laughing our asses off.
And yet this still feels like a phony oasis. A huge majority of Republicans stuck with Moore and Trump last Tuesday. And we’ve learned one new and sickening thing this past month: Republican tribalism demands that the Mueller investigation be aggressively smeared in advance, its findings preemptively discredited, and its lawyers smeared for political loyalties, even when there is no evidence that this is affecting the special counsel’s work. In much of Trump media, Mueller’s alleged corruption and bias are fast becoming an article of faith. Night after night on Fox, it’s an endless diatribe against the special counsel, a constant drumbeat of propaganda about a “tainted probe.” Central to it is that waddling eminence, Newt Gingrich, who is openly arguing that Mueller is engineering some kind of coup against the will of the Trump masses.
This is not just from the media fever swamps. Take even formerly “Never Trump” National Review, which this week gave prominent space to an essay that draws this conclusion: “By now there are simply too many coincidental conflicts of interest and too much improper investigatory behavior to continue to give the Mueller investigation the benefit of doubt. Each is a light straw; together, they now have broken the back of the probe’s reputation.” The House Judiciary Committee’s grilling of Rod Rosenstein this week also revealed a near-universal Republican consensus that the investigation is rigged. E.J. Dionne recently noted “the statement of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that if every member of Mueller’s team who was ‘anti-Trump’were kicked off, ‘I don’t know if there’d be anyone left.’” Jordan also declared that “the public trust in this whole thing is gone.” Ben Wittes is rightly worried that the House Republicans “are braying for actions inimical to the very idea of independent law enforcement. They are doing it about someone, Mueller, with whom they have long experience and about whom they know their essential claims to be false.”
The best news from Alabama is that the right’s strategy of constantly upping the ante, of mainlining tribalism so that the completely indefensible becomes a badge of honor, has reached an apparent limit. It took an alleged teen predator with contempt for the Constitution and nostalgia for the Confederacy to get us there, but we now know there is some kind of backstop. And so if Trump decides to wage war against Mueller, and pits his own ego against bedrock principles of the rule of law, there’s a chance he won’t quite get away with it. About a 51–49 chance. Our system of government — whatever today’s polling numbers — is hanging by roughly that margin.
And they say Alabama was a nail-biter.
Don’t Forget Testosterone!
Well, I guess I should have seen this coming:
We have to stop seeing sexual harassment and sexual assault as some sort of flattery of women gone awry. In truth, sexual assault has nothing to do with sex, or sexuality, or flirting, or courtship, or love. Rather, sexual assault is a kind of hate. The men who gratify themselves by abusing women aren’t getting off on those women, but on power. These men don’t sexually assault women because they like women but because they despise them as subordinate creatures.
Here’s a question. If sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are entirely about misogyny, sexism, and hate, how do you explain the cases of Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer and James Levine? Their patterns seem very similar to many of the other heterosexual cases — and worse than many. And yet there are no women involved whatsoever. What gives?
My own suggestion of an answer to this conundrum is a combination of two things: the resilient human ability (which knows no gender) to abuse power; and the role that testosterone plays in making sex an area in which men abuse that power far more frequently than women. I’m sure that if you’ve endured a lifetime of male depredations (as many women have) it’s utterly understandable why you might see this as entirely about misogyny — and in many cases, you’d be at least partly right. But it’s also, it seems to me, about what testosterone does to men’s minds and bodies, whether there are women around or not.
I’ve been fascinated by this question for quite a while now — my interest was sparked by my own medical use of testosterone as part of my HIV regimen, and I explored the issue at length here. To experience a sudden surge in testosterone — and to see oneself almost structurally altered by it — is to wake up to forces that are so much part of the background we can forget they’re there at all. Men have ten times as much testosterone as women, and testosterone is deeply connected with aggression, power, ambition, drive, pride, stubbornness, strength, and violence. In every species, testosterone makes one gender the more risk-taking, the more physically powerful, and the more assertive, and this includes the small number of species in which testosterone is predominant among females. It is also worth reflecting (for a few seconds, at least) on the simple physical fact that human reproduction requires the male to penetrate a female repeatedly in order to orgasm. This cannot happen in reverse. In the act itself, if it is to achieve its most obvious purpose, sex and power are inherently fused.
And so it is no big surprise that gay male sexuality, for example, has more in common with straight male sexuality than most of us want to acknowledge — because we’re afflicted and blessed with the same psyche-forming hormone. Many gay men, especially younger ones, want to get laid any time all the time, and will drop anything at any moment to get it. Gay men also objectify other men in exactly the same way straight men objectify women (“locker room talk” is by no means an exclusively straight phenomenon, except with gays, it’s other men whose body parts get scrutinized). If you want to know what handsy can really mean, check out the middle of the dance floor. And yes, the gay male sex drive leads us into blind alleys, and horrible blunders (as well as some of the greatest loves humans can ever know). We can often see sex as an act rather than as a relationship. We can be blind to the feelings of others. There’s a ruthlessness to the hierarchy of beauty and youth in many parts of gay culture that would be instantly recognizable to any woman. On the apps, where most gay sexual socializing now takes place, we broadcast desire with all the subtlety of a Breitbart op-ed.
The absence of women, moreover, removes most obstacles to getting laid any time you really want to. So gay men are particularly vulnerable to drowning, or at least getting swept up, in the undertow of testosterone. Gay men, like straight men, risk jobs, relationships, marriages, you name it … for a quick and ready lay. And when we’re really horny, most of our brains disappear out the window in an obsessive pursuit of the nut, seconds after which we come to, shake our heads, and wonder “How on Earth did I end up here?” This has never been better expressed than in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, and I don’t usually get a chance to air the Bard, so check out this small slice of genius:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
“All this the world well knows.” Except today’s debate about men and women seems to have missed it.
I’m not praising or lamenting this. I’m just recognizing it. It excuses nothing with respect to abuse, assault, harassment, and so on. There’s a bright line here and I see little moral difference between Spacey’s foulness and Weinstein’s. But testosterone helps explain why male power primarily gravitates toward sex, why sexual abuse occurs much more often among men, and why separating sex and power from male sexuality is to miss something important. It is always about both. If we are to have a conversation about men and women, work and play, power and love, then ignoring nature — pretending that this is all about social power dynamics or even hatred — is a very misleading thing.
You could see the gay world, I suppose, in part, as men’s revenge on men. That isn’t all it is, of course. It’s as varied and as complicated as any human community. But we gay men may see testosterone’s power more clearly than most, and recognize in its worst expressions much less about the hatred of women than about the sometimes pitiable weakness — and occasionally glorious strength — of men.
When Buddhists Attack
The more we learn about the Myanmar government’s genocidal attack on its Muslim minority, the worse it appears. Here’s an incident featured in a helpful, if terribly grueling, AP investigation:
The men broke down the door. There were five of them this time, F remembers. They slashed the boy’s throat, and killed the man. Then they turned to the man’s wife, and to F. And her nightmare began again. They stripped off the women’s clothes and threw them to the floor. F’s friend fought back, and the men beat her so viciously the skin on her thighs began to peel away. But the fight had gone out of F. She felt her body go soft, felt the blood run between her legs as the first man forced himself on her, and then the second. Three men savaged her friend. When it was over, the women lay on the floor for days.
The rapes were systematic, and on a massive scale, and the genocidal campaign of terror has forced half a million from their homes. My point in this is not just to keep some perspective in an age when Omarosa’s tantrums are on the front pages, but to note something absent in the discussion around these atrocities: No one has mentioned Buddhism as a cause for this mass murder. No one has demanded an explanation from leading Buddhist practitioners for this act of religiously based atrocity; no one appears to have plumbed Buddhist teaching to find some justification for it; and no one has argued that Buddhism is a religion of mass murder.
Because it isn’t.
But when Buddhism becomes a tribal identity, and when this is fused with even minor ethnic variations, the evil planted in our DNA takes over. The ethnic cleansing wasn’t unprovoked — Rohingya guerrillas initiated this round of conflict— but the response was hugely disproportionate, and almost blind with mad rage. Arguably the most peaceful religious practice on the planet can become an instrument for mass murder and rape, once it moves from the personal to the political.
This is not to ignore the obvious truth that the religion most prone to this hideous tendency at this point in global history is Islam. It is to note that it really doesn’t matter what the doctrinal content of that religion is once tribal passion floods the frontal cortex. It is not Islamophobic to worry about how Islam is currently expressed in some parts of the world and in some unhinged fanatics within it. It is Islamophobic to believe that mass violence is somehow inherent in Islam in a way it isn’t in other faiths. Think of a Buddhist monk, meditating for years, performing good works, emanating peace and loving-kindness. Then think of those Buddhist rapists, slitting throats, repeatedly violating women, consumed with near-bestial hate. Yes, this is humanity in the throes of religion. All of it.
See you next Friday.
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The GOP Is About to Tumble Into Full-Scale Panic |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 15 December 2017 09:37 |
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Rich writes: "I am one of those pessimists who thought Moore would eke it out in Alabama. How happy I am to be wrong! I am also one of those optimists who firmly believes that Donald Trump will look for a White House exit before the end of his first term."
Doug Jones. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The GOP Is About to Tumble Into Full-Scale Panic
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
15 December 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the stunning outcome of the Alabama Senate race and its potential effects on American politics.
 n an election that had forecasters puzzled, Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore last night, reducing GOP’s Senate majority to one vote. What do you take away from the results in Alabama?
I am one of those pessimists who thought Moore would eke it out in Alabama. How happy I am to be wrong! I am also one of those optimists who firmly believes that Donald Trump will look for a White House exit before the end of his first term — whether he’s done in by the Robert Mueller investigation, a desire to rescue his family business and the two relatives in gravest legal jeopardy (son Fredo and son-in-law Jared), or his diet of junk food and Diet Coke. That optimism is bolstered by yesterday’s Alabama vote. Jones’s victory will further destabilize Trump both psychologically and politically. Psychologically because he hates being seen as a loser, and his futile all-in endorsement of an alleged child molester for the U.S. Senate implants a big L on his chest that no Twitter rant can erase. This scarlet letter will drive him crazy — or, perhaps one should say, crazier. Meanwhile, he will be imprisoned in political gridlock. The GOP, having lost a safe Senate seat in one of the nation’s reddest states, is about to tumble into full-scale panic as it tries to ward off the erosion and possibly the evisceration of its Congressional majorities in 2018. It will not even pretend to do Trump’s bidding while swing voters are watching closely.
The Republicans have a lot to fear. As the Washington Post put it, the only achievement they have to run on next year is “a tax-cut bill that has polled poorly and delivers most of its direct benefit to corporations and the wealthy.” (Even this achievement is predicated on the widespread but perhaps not airtight assumption that the final bill will sail through Congress between now and Jones’s senatorial swearing-in after New Year’s.) This morning, Republicans on next year’s ballot have to be looking hard at some of the more alarming (for them) findings of the Alabama exit polls. The most significant of these may be African-American turnout. Midterm election results during Barack Obama’s presidency — as well as Hillary Clinton’s defeat last year — consistently showed diminished black turnout when Obama was not on the ballot. That was not true yesterday: The African-American percentage of voters in Alabama matched that of the Obama victories of 2008 and 2012. Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the John Roberts Supreme Court are doing everything possible to aid and abet local efforts to suppress minority voting, but yesterday black voters fought back in Trump-era Selma (where Jones routed Moore) as they did in the Jim Crow Selma of a half-century ago. It’s a potentially momentous development for states and districts up for grabs next year.
The gender and generational gaps were also devastating for Moore. In Alabama and beyond, Trump has solidified the party’s national identity as a last redoubt for old white guys who can’t get enough of Sean Hannity. No wonder the latest national Marist poll this month finds that voters are leaning toward generic Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans in 2018 by a margin of 13 points. As the conservative writer John Podhoretz points out this morning, the two parties were in a virtual dead heat on this poll question at the same juncture in 2009, ten months before the GOP gave the Democrats what Obama rightly called a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. As Podhoretz concludes, the Republicans have a good chance of being “smashed into a million pieces next November.”
Roy Moore’s campaign was the clearest demonstration yet of the Bannon/McConnell fault line within the Republican Party. How does Moore’s loss change Steve Bannon’s hopes for a party insurrection?
As has been true since Trump’s rise began, some analysts are once again hopefully spotting a resurgence of McConnell-Ryan Republicanism over the Trumpism codified by Bannon into a toxic admixture of nationalism and white supremacy. That is hardly the case. That new Marist poll finds that while Trump has only a 37 percent national approval rating, his approval rating among Republicans is still 84 percent. The latest Quinnipiac poll finds roughly the same (an 85 percent Trump approval rating among Republicans). Yesterday’s Alabama exit poll put McConnell’s approval rating at 16 percent among Moore and Jones voters alike. There’s no ambiguity here: The GOP is still the party of Trumpism, no matter what happened to Moore or what happens to Trump. The mathematical problem for the GOP is that that loyal Trumpist base, more than four-fifths of Republicans but only a third of the country, is not and never will be a national majority. If Democrats can peel off that roughly 15 percent of Republicans (suburban, female, young) who are repulsed by Trump-Bannonism and energize their own base, as happened yesterday in Alabama and earlier this year in Virginia, the numbers are there for a wave election next year and perhaps two years after that. (Unless the Democrats find a way to screw it up — as always a possibility never to be underestimated.)
With Trump’s Twitter smear against Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats are lining up behind the senator’s call for Trump’s resignation over multiple allegations of sexual assault. How does Jones’s victory strengthen the party’s ability to oppose the president?
Perhaps the most important (and exciting) national political development ratified in Alabama yesterday is the power of the #MeToo movement. It is still too early to gauge where this overdue and ever-swelling tsunami of political and social change is going to lead. In the short term, it is imperative that Democrats and any brave Republicans out there keep after the president’s own admitted history of serial sexual assault. That Gillibrand’s call for Trump’s resignation provoked such a gross tweet in response revealed two things: (1) He is fearful of his accusers as they again are emboldened to go public with their stories; (2) He has no sense of how much momentum and power this movement has gathered in the months since his election. It may soon be incumbent upon even GOP senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to join Democrats like Gillibrand. It remains essential that NBC and the producer Mark Burnett release any evidence of Trump criminality contained in videos or files from The Apprentice. We should not overlook the possibility that Trump’s history of sexual assault has as much potential to cripple or end his presidency as Mueller, the 2018 midterms, and Big Macs.
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