Atlantic Monthly mag atlmo

---

PRIMARY ON FREQ AND EZ

2ndary on step up to trump fascism, primary pend on oct surprise

repeatedly punked? nat'l jrnl publisher? see atl media

merri ok

~ FASCISM

suckers and losers story broke

sellout? --> 12 23 whole issue on trump fascism

---

MSN

McKay Coppins on the rise of gambling in America

Staff Writer for The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, jumped headfirst into the world of online sports-betting to learn more about the rise of gambling in America. He joins Stephanie Ruhle on The 11th Hour to discuss his piece "Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler."

---

root cause SYS DEGRAD SCOTUS CU an 1 26

gingrich lang memo--> POLARYSIS // CHECKS BALANCE SURRENDER

All of the dysfunction in Congress is coming from decisions that the U.S. Supreme Court ushered in, and it is completely changing the face of American government, a legal scholar explained.

Writing for The Atlantic on Tuesday, Stanford Law School fellow Duncan Hosie said that there are two key rulings that have resulted in the downfall of Congress.

"These dynamics share a root cause: the partisan polarization that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades," wrote Hosie. "But the connection is deeper and more complex than that. Whereas polarization weakened Congress, it emboldened the Court to dismantle laws and, in the process, undermine Congress’s ability to make laws at all, reinforcing Congress’s sclerosis."

The first began during the "Newt Gingrich revolution," he argued, with "rising partisanship and institutional upheaval."

Sorting members into "distant ideological camps and normalizing scorched-earth tactics" led to absolutist politics and made bipartisan politics for the greater good rare. Instead, ideological battles were launched with Supreme Court nominees with a litmus tests for partisan purity over reasonable interpretations of the law. Even justices below the High Court have become partisan as "Republican appointees began consolidating its authority at Congress’s expense."

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, Hosie said, the Court has canceled "congressional constitutionalism." Laws passed such as the Voting Rights Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and campaign finance regulations have all be undermined by the Roberts cCurt.

The latter took a hit with a collection of decisions, such as Citizens United (2010), that "dismantled Congress’s two most significant efforts to regulate private money in public elections, eroding the safeguards that protect elections as conduits of public opinion," Hosie wrote.

There's a chance one case this year could make such issues even worse. The Roberts Court "dismantling" key laws "has left Congress more detached from its electorate, diminishing its claim and role as a representative authority."

Deregulating campaign finance laws has turned politics into such a huge undertaking that lawmakers and candidate spend more time trying to raise money than they do making direct contact with voters, conducting legislative oversight or fostering bipartisanship, the legal scholar said.

"Empiricalstudies confirm that reliance on large donors depresses participation in time-intensive legislative activities — things such as bill sponsorship, floor debate and committee work," Hosie wrote. "It simultaneously redirects lawmakers’ attention toward courting high-net-worth donors and away from talking to people in their districts."

The second issue is gerrymandering. Partisan legislatures draw maps that make congressional districts more one-sided. It then ensures that members of Congress appeal to the most extreme factions of their electorate.

Hosie called the court's ruling in "Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) [the most] entrenched electoral distortion in American politics. The Court has since doubled down. Last month, Justice Samuel Alito defended Texas’s gerrymandered maps on the grounds that they reflected 'partisan advantage pure and simple' — an unabashed apologia for a practice destructive to democracy."

Drawing congressional maps to craft "safe seats" means the ideologues win. That can "marginalize moderate voices," he explained. It reduces any incentive for compromise and accountability.

These rulings have ultimately reduced the power of Congress and expanded that of the judiciary branch that was meant to be equal under the Constitution. "Substantively, it has redefined what the Constitution forbids, preemptively removing entire policy domains from democratic deliberation before voters and lawmakers can even weigh in," Hosie closed.

*Read more here. The Atlantic

Ideas

How the Supreme Court Broke Congress

In the name of protecting the balance of powers, the Court is radically refashioning that balance.

By Duncan Hosie

January 13, 2026, 6:30 AM ET

Two dynamics are fundamentally reshaping the structure and functioning of the American government. The first, which is quite well known, is Congress’s decline. The second, perhaps somewhat less appreciated but no less significant, is the Supreme Court’s ascent—its expansion of its power into areas previously thought to be off-limits.

These dynamics share a root cause: the partisan polarization that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades. But the connection is deeper and more complex than that. Whereas polarization weakened Congress, it emboldened the Court to dismantle laws and, in the process, undermine Congress’s ability to make laws at all, reinforcing Congress’s sclerosis.

The citizens and commentators shouting from the sidelines that Congress must act, fix itself, and reclaim its intended role are not wrong. But they miss that the Court has made doing so nearly impossible. The practical result is a Congress caught between paralysis and policing, mostly incapable of translating collective judgment into law and, when it does manage to do so, vulnerable to having its most significant accomplishments—civil-rights enforcement, voting protections, campaign-finance reform, administrative authority—erased by judicial decree. The judiciary, long conceptualized as a check on legislative excess, is now defined by its own excess against legislative charge.

Keep reading The Atlantic.

---

RWW

04/20/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Sarah Fitzpatrick @ The Atlantic: The FBI Director Is MIA

Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Confronting ugly allegations, FBI Director Kash Patel files new $250 million lawsuit

The Atlantic reported that FBI personnel have expressed concerns about the director’s unexplained absences and excessive drinking. He sued a few days later.

---

AN 1 26

Although President Donald Trump's overall approval ratings are weak, he continues to poll well among his hardcore MAGA base — including far-right white Christian fundamentalist evangelicals. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her allies in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are using Christian nationalist arguments to recruit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, quoting scripture in videos posted on Instagram.

But Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner, in an article published by The Atlantic on January 20, argues that the Trump Administration's militarized ICE raids are inconsistent with traditional "Christian values."

To make his point, Wehner references Tobias Cremer — a member of the European Parliament and author of the 2023 book, "The Godless Crusade."

"Right-wing populists don't view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the 'pure people' against external 'others,' while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions," Wehner explains. "Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus."

Wehner continues, "The Trump Administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling, in a dozen different ways, cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies."

The Never Trump conservative notes that Christianity, over the years, has had "glorious moments" as well as "some very dark turns."

"Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals — not just cultural Christians, but also, those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings — prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus," Wehner laments. "Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so, they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It's rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist — who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless."

Wehner adds, "The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for. This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come."

*Peter Wehner's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

---

AN 1 26

The core basis of the MAGA movement's ideology has effectively been debunked, according to one journalist who has been covering President Donald Trump's crackdown in Minneapolis.

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer claimed earlier this week that "Minnesota proved MAGA wrong" in the wake of the Trump administration's "Operation Metro Surge" this month. In a Wednesday interview, Serwer told the Bulwark's Tim Miller: ""The right has a social theory that multiracial, multi-faith communities cannot be 'cohesive,' that our chaos is the result of the presence of people who are different from us," and then argued that the anti-immigration argument didn't pass muster, pointing to the diverse nature of Minneapolis and the hyper-local network that people of all backgrounds organized in order to protect their neighbors.

Miller prodded Serwer by playing a clip of Vice President JD Vance's interview with the New York Times' Ross Douthat last year, in which Vance asserted that "those who care about what may be called the common good" discount "how destructive to the common good immigration at the levels and at the pace that we've seen over the last few years."

"I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly," said Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants. "And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country. Social solidarity is destroyed by migration."

Serwer said while Vance's argument technically "makes sense on paper" and has a "logical progression to it," it was still "wrong."

"We know it's wrong because we can see in Minneapolis, we can see a group of people who, we can see these communities of people who say, 'you are my neighbor whether you were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. You are my neighbor and I'm going to protect you. I'm going to walk your kids to the bus stop because I know you can't go outside. I'm going to bring you food if you need to stay at home. I'm going to help you pay your rent. If I see ICE, I'm going to blow my whistle or I'm going to take out my camera and start filming.'"

"It's a little weird to say that when you consider that a substantial amount of the white population in the United States was segregated into ethnic enclaves where people only spoke their original language for much of the late 19th and early 20th century," he contimued. "And it turned out OK. And what we have here is immigrants are actually assimilating much faster than in that period, like much faster, like second, third generation, they only speak English. So it's just not true."

"What is so moving about the sort of neighborism there is that everybody says it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what gender you are, it doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter what religion you are. You are my neighbor. I will defend you," Serwer added. "And that is a level of commitment to social cohesion that I have yet to see from anybody in the MAGA coalition who all seem to be about stating these things, not so much as a matter of principles they want to see lived in the world, but as a question of brand-building and political identity, which is, I think what JD Vance is doing."

---

Duncan Hosie: “Two dynamics are fundamentally reshaping the structure and functioning of the American government. The first, which is quite well known, is Congress’s decline. The second, perhaps somewhat less appreciated but no less significant, is the Supreme Court’s ascent—its expansion of its power into areas previously thought to be off-limits.

“These dynamics share a root cause: the partisan polarization that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades. But the connection is deeper and more complex than that. Whereas polarization weakened Congress, it emboldened the Court to dismantle laws and, in the process, undermine Congress’s ability to make laws at all, reinforcing Congress’s sclerosis.

“The citizens and commentators shouting from the sidelines that Congress must act, fix itself, and reclaim its intended role are not wrong. But they miss that the Court has made doing so nearly impossible. The practical result is a Congress caught between paralysis and policing, mostly incapable of translating collective judgment into law and, when it does manage to do so, vulnerable to having its most significant accomplishments—civil-rights enforcement, voting protections, campaign-finance reform, administrative authority—erased by judicial decree. The judiciary, long conceptualized as a check on legislative excess, is now defined by its own excess against legislative charge.

“The Court’s usurpation runs deeper than the invalidation of statutes with a liberal cast, though there has been plenty of that. It is curbing a competing source of constitutional interpretation, kneecapping an institution that speaks with its own voice and channels public commitments into durable legal forms. In the name of protecting the balance of powers, the Court is radically refashioning that balance, claiming for itself the final and exclusive authority not only over which laws stand but over who gets to say what the Constitution means.”

The story of Trump insulting service members was confirmed by Trump's own chief of staff. Right-wing media are still denying it.

WRITTEN BY JANE LEE & HELENA HIND

PUBLISHED 07/01/24

After The Atlantic reported in 2020 that former President Donald Trump had disparaged fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” during a trip to Paris in 2018, right-wing media erupted to protect the former president ahead of the 2020 election. Fox News and other pro-Trump media outlets denied the reporting and attacked The Atlantic's sources, despite a former Trump administration official and other news outlets (including Fox News) confirming Trump's comments. Right-wing media continue to call the report “fake news” in 2024.

### In September 2020, The Atlantic published a report that Trump canceled a visit to honor American war dead, calling them “losers” and “suckers”

In 2018, former President Donald Trump canceled a visit to honor American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, blaming the rain for the cancellation. However, The Atlantic reported:

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

### The report has been confirmed independently by other outlets, including Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly

Hours after the Atlantic report’s publication, the Associated Press independently confirmed Trump’s 2018 remarks.“A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press, including the 2018 cemetery comments,” the AP reported. AP, [9/3/20]

- The Washington Post sourced “a former senior administration official” who confirmed that Trump “frequently made disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring to them at times as ‘losers.’” Washington Post, [9/4/20]

- Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin corroborated multiple details of The Atlantic’s reporting in a series of tweets and in a segment on Fox News, which resulted in Trump calling for her firing. Griffin tweeted on September 4: “Two former sr Trump admin officials confirm .@JeffreyGoldberg reporting that President Trump disparaged veterans and did not want to drive to honor American war dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery outside Paris.” On Fox News, Griffin reported that her source deemed Trump’s disparagement of fallen soldiers a “character flaw.” Trump then lashed out at Griffin and Fox News itself on Twitter: “Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!” Media Matters, [9/4/20; Fox News, 9/5/20; Axios, 9/5/20]

- In October 2023, former Trump chief of staff John Kelly confirmed Trump’s “suckers” and “losers” comments to CNN in a lengthy statement. Kelly called Trump “a person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.” CNN, [10/3/23]

### Right-wing media responded by denouncing the story, attacking anonymous sources and The Atlantic, and accusing Democrats of trying to distract from their failures. They’re still denying the story today.

The morning after the article came out, Fox & Friends defended its most important viewer. Ret. Gen. Jack Keane claimed that Trump actually has “reverence for the military.”. Co-host Pete Hegseth complained that it’s “always anonymous sources.” Media Matters, [9/4/20]

- Then-chief White House correspondent John Roberts denied the veracity of the report: “To a person, all three of these people have said the president never used the words ‘suckers’ or ‘losers’ to describe U.S. troops who have either died in that war or any other war. Those words were just never used in that meeting when they were discussing whether or not the president would go out there.” Fox News, *The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino*, [9/4/20]

- Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that the Atlantic report of Trump disrespecting fallen troops was a plot to distract from “the Pelosi hair salon story.” Premiere Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [9/4/20]

- Hegseth claimed that “the leftist media created this story because they need to change the narrative or create a new narrative” and attacked the author, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, for being a Democrat. Fox News, *Fox & Friends Saturday*, [9/5/20]

- Fox’s Jeanine Pirro called the claim an “absurdity” and discredited the report for using anonymous sources, despite the fact that the story was confirmed by colleague Jennifer Griffin. Mediaite, [9/5/20]

- After Fox’s Jessica Tarlov cited multiple report confirming the Atlantic story including Jennifer Griffin’s, chief political anchor Bret Baier interrupted with “a caveat”: “I agree with you, there are elements of that reporting that Jennifer confirmed from sources, but … there are other elements that appear to be pretty — to push back pretty hard.” Mediaite, [9/6/20]

- Immediately after Jennifer Griffin reconfirmed her report, Fox contributor Mike Huckabee vehemently denied that Trump insulted fallen soldiers and accused the anonymous sources of attempting to influence the election: “If these sources are so dang good, trot them out in front of a microphone and a camera. And if they’re not willing to put their name and face in the middle of an election, which they’re trying to influence, then they have no right to be heard. … Until we know that, I think all of this stuff is just a bunch of hogwash.” Fox News, *America’s News Headquarters*, [9/7/20]

- Former The Five co-host Geraldo Rivera called the report “a hit job.” “What the Democrats are doing – and it’s so obvious to me – they can’t attack the economy, so what they’re doing is, they are conjuring up a story that the president called G.I.s losers.” Fox News, *The Five*, [9/7/20]

- Former Fox host Lou Dobbs attacked Fox News’ report confirming the Atlantic article that claimed Trump disrespected military veterans. Fox Business, *Lou Dobbs Tonight*, [9/8/20]

- Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed the Atlantic story corroborated by Jennifer Griffin about Trump insulting troops is “now-debunked.” Media Matters, [9/8/20]

- One America News Network correspondent Chanel Rion smeared The Atlantic as “a privately-funded fiction factory for the DNC” and baselessly accused Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg of “invent[ing] the story at the behest of Atlantic leadership.” OANN, *Wall to Wall with Greta*, [9/9/20]

- In a phone interview with Trump, Fox News host Sean Hannity touted Trump’s defense policy and gave him an opportunity to deny The Atlantic’s reporting, which he did. “It’s a total lie, it’s total disinformation,” Trump told Hannity, “They made up the story.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/9/20]

- On Fox News, former Trump White House press secretary and current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied Trump’s comments and called the anonymous sources “cowards.” Fox News, *MediaBuzz*, [9/13/20]

- In an op-ed for Newsmax.com, Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock called The Atlantic’s reporting a “disgusting fabrication” and accused the Obama administration of running “a veritable killing field for vets.” “The Atlantic got it perfectly backwards: As 700-plus vets attested in an open letter, President Trump has honored and benefited them and their brothers and sisters in uniform. Meanwhile, Obama-Biden treated America’s veterans like losers and suckers,” Murdock wrote. Newsmax.com, [9/13/20]

- In April 2024, Newsmax host Greg Kelly said, “The people who need insults and a little bit of denigrating are actually the generals who made this story up and leaked it to the fake news.” Newsmax, *Greg Kelly Reports*, [4/17/24]

- Ben Shapiro claimed the Atlantic story had been “largely debunked” and “denied by pretty much everybody.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [6/28/24]

- Anchor Martha MacCallum interrupted Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who was pointing out that Trump lied about not calling fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” MacCallum said, “You know he has completely denied. Yeah, he’s completely denied.” Fox News, *The Story*, [6/28/24]

---

essay was originally published in The Atlantic on Aug. 28, 2022 and can be accessed online here.

We Can Be Framers Too

*The Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.

By Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The recent set of watershed Supreme Court opinions pulsates with the language of democratic accountability. Dobbs v. Jackson, overruling Roe v. Wade, makes its refrain the promise to “return” the abortion question “to the people and their elected representatives.” Concurring in West Virginia v. EPA, which restricts regulators’ ability to decarbonize the electricity grid, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained that the point of the decision was to keep power in the hands of “the people’s representatives” rather than “a ruling class of largely unaccountable ‘ministers.’”

In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down New York State’s 117-year-old limitation on carrying weapons, Justice Clarence Thomas presented the Court’s severe, originalist approach to the Second Amendment as a vindication of a judgment “by the people” against wishy-washy federal judges who had let the restriction stand. Indeed, while these opinions have little in common besides their conservative outcomes—Dobbs eliminated a personal right, Bruen expanded a right, and West Virginia curtailed agency interpretations of statutes such as the Clean Air Act—they all claim to protect the rightful power of “the people.”

Liberal critics, in turn, have appealed to democracy in attacking the Court as “radical” and “illegitimate.” Majorities tend to support abortion rights, climate action, and gun control, they point out, so whatever mythic “people” the justices have in mind, they are going against those people as they actually exist today. Calls to add justices to the Court, deny it jurisdiction over certain cases, or even impeach some conservative justices all come in the name of greater democratic control. Some progressives hope to get back to a more democratic Constitution, whether it is in the spirit of the reformist Warren Court of the 1950s and ’60s (the Court that gave us Brown v. Board of Education and the one-person-one-vote principle); the New Deal vision of a “second bill of rights,” including rights to good work and economic security; or even an “abolition constitution” rooted in radical traditions of freedom and equality.

But the Constitution is too fundamentally antidemocratic a document to serve democratic purposes reliably. If we want to make it genuinely and lastingly democratic, we will first have to consider changing it in the most basic way: by amending Article V, which governs amendments and so serves as the gatekeeper for living generations to say what they—we—believe American fundamental law should be. This would be a way of empowering ourselves to become founders, over and over, and not just inheritors.

The feeling that the Court is dangerously abusing its power is a new experience for many of today’s liberals (not so for conservatives, who denounced the Court for decades before finally taking it over), but it is just the latest episode of a long-standing dynamic that we might call the Iron Law of Judicial Oligarchy. Because the Constitution establishes fundamental law and is itself hard to amend, judicial interpretation is always a key lever of power in American politics. Because power attracts agendas, various constituencies are always crowding around the Court. Before the Civil War, the justices upheld the prerogatives of slaveholders and the interests of the white oligarchies in the slave states, forming a key part of Southern Democrats’ grip on national power.

That’s why, in his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln warned that “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” From the 1880s through the 1930s, the Court protected capitalist interests from populists, unions, and other radicals, striking down labor regulations, an income tax, and other forward-thinking policies. Progressives rallied against it. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt promised to “put the fear of God into judges” who had struck down labor legislation. In 1924, the great reformist senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment authorizing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions that invalidated federal laws—a proposal whose insurrectionary spirit future Justice Felix Frankfurter praised in The New Republic, lamenting of the pro-business jurisprudence of his time, “we have never had a more irresponsible Supreme Court.”

What has been unusual in the past 70 years—that is, all of living memory—is that the Court has been mostly seen as, on balance, a liberal institution, partly on the strength of now long-past desegregation and voting-rights cases, partly because of high-profile LGBTQ-rights cases in more recent decades. That progressive reputation has been largely misplaced for a while. The Court has been expanding protection for big money in politics since 1976, with dramatic developments since Citizens United in 2010. It cut the legs from under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion in 2012 and from Voting Rights Act enforcement in 2013. It announced a personal right to bear arms outside militia service in 2008. But the term that ended in June 2022 sounded a trumpet blast that no one could ignore. The Court is now seen for what it is: a node of conservative power in American government that will persist for years, regardless of elections and popular opinion.

The flip side of the Iron Law of Judicial Oligarchy is a recurrent populist counterblast to the Court’s power, which denies the Court’s legitimacy in the name of democracy. Who are these old, politically connected lawyers to tell us what our fundamental law is? Who do they think they are (as Justice John Roberts asked in dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing a right to same-sex marriage)? Progressives asked the same question when the Court was striking down labor laws a century ago. Today’s liberals belong to a party, and often to movements, in which elite lawyers have long been overrepresented, and going to court has tended to be the first response to any new political conflict. They are rediscovering that the Court is an oligarchic institution and trying to remember how to be its populist critics. This is a change in worldview, even in identity, for people who have spent their lives regarding the Court as the bulwark of constitutional legitimacy, even against decades of growing counterexamples.

The Constitution produces judicial oligarchy (and inspires populist backlash) through several of its features: federal judges’ life tenure, their nomination by the president (twice in this century elected by someone who won the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote—something that would have happened again in 2020 with a switch of fewer than 50,000 votes), and their confirmation by the Senate (whose Republican majority during Donald Trump’s presidency represented significantly less than half of the country’s population).

But the root of judicial oligarchy is that the Constitution is almost impossible to change. Article V requires that amendments be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through the state legislatures or in special conventions. (The convention route has happened only once, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.) The upshot is that it takes only 13 states to block a proposed amendment. And to send an amendment to the states in the first place, the proposed language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

There is an alternative route, in which two-thirds of state legislatures call on Congress to establish a special convention, which then proposes language to the states; this has never happened. With these hurdles in place, it’s no wonder that no meaningful amendment has been ratified in 50 years, nor that the fundamental changes in constitutional law for the past century—upholding the New Deal, pressing desegregation and voting rights, embracing and then rejecting abortion rights, protecting money in politics, establishing a personal right to bear arms—have all come through judicial interpretation of the Constitution, not democratic decisions to update the Constitution itself.

It may be hard to see the judicial monopoly on constitutional change (and, by the same token, on constitutional stasis) as the problem with the Constitution, because we are so accustomed to it. How else could a constitution work? But there is an answer right on the face of our Constitution, which opens with the words “We the People.” That “we” is the subject of the first sentence of the Constitution, and it goes on to “ordain and establish” everything that follows. On its own terms, it is law because “we” made it law.

But that “we” isn’t us. When that language was ratified in 1789, its “we” was all male, nearly all white, and mostly restricted to property holders. Every one of its members lived in an 18th-century agrarian republic and died a very long time ago. Even the Fourteenth Amendment, the basis of many modern constitutional rights, was ratified in 1868 by male citizens of a patriarchal country that had just abolished formal slavery. Almost all of those men have been dead for a century or more.

As striking as the demographic differences are between who counted as “the people” in 1789 or 1868 versus today, the most fundamental problem is the tyranny of the past over the present. If today’s Americans could freely decide that the Second Amendment’s “right of the People to keep and bear arms” should remain our fundamental law today, it wouldn’t really matter that the language was, in a sense, proposed to us by members of a very different, long-ago society. The real scandal of the Constitution is that it gives the living people no real choice in the matter. Past generations dictate our fundamental law.

Indeed, even if those past political processes had been much more inclusive, they would still belong to the past. If we take seriously the democratic principle of ratification that the phrase “We the People” suggests, then nothing can make another generation’s fundamental law count as ours except our consenting to it. In American constitutional law, silence—the fact that we have not amended the Constitution—counts as consent. But because amending the Constitution is nearly impossible, our silence is compelled, then laundered into consent.

Plenty of efforts have been made to square this circle, but none has really worked. The justices of the Supreme Court interpret an old and rather brief Constitution, and they do so under constant pressure from talented lawyers to find new meanings in phrases such as equal protection of the laws, words like liberty, or the general pattern of authority that the Constitution creates among the states and the national government. No wonder so many of the justices’ opinions seem to come down to what W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction impatiently called “incantation and abracadabra.”

At the moment, the most notorious abracadabra is originalism. The method of the Court’s recent gun-rights decisions, and deeply influential in its rejection of Roe (although Justice Samuel Alito presented his analysis inDobbsas more traditionalist than strictly originalist), it purports to anchor constitutional interpretation to the public meaning the words had when they were ratified. Originalism strikes its critics as ancestor worship—worse, the selective worship of some Americans’ white, property-holding, male ancestors. But as the late Justice Antonin Scalia often explained, the basic theory of originalism is that the Constitution changes only when the people mobilize to change it. The alternative, he warned, was that it would change whenever five justices changed their minds, which would put ultimate political power in the hands of the Court. Originalism makes what sense it does because it is a way of defining the justices’ power as compatible with democracy—at least notionally.

Due to its premise that legitimate constitutional change comes only from the people, originalism would be a pretty solid way to interpret a constitution that living majorities had meaningful power to change. Were the amendment process a lower hurdle, it really would make sense to say that if we haven’t made new fundamental law, that must show that we are content with the old law. But our Constitution is not that kind.

Because constitutional text is effectively closed to change, anti-originalist justices have felt justified in finding new constitutional meanings in the old language. After all, the world changes; who else but judges will change the Constitution accordingly? The passage of time brings new insights, former Justice Anthony Kennedy replied to Justice Scalia in Obergefell, and only expansive interpretation can bring those insights into the old text. Freedom and equality have very different meanings in our lives today than in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Why should the Constitution be stuck when the rest of us are moving on, using old words in new ways?

Each side can clearly see Du Bois’s abracadabra in the other. Each is partly right about the other’s democracy problem. Living constitutionalism is sincerely motivated, but its originalist critics are not wrong: It does amount to saying that, on key issues, “the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” as Justice Scalia pungently put it. By the same token, with a frozen constitutional text, originalism can handcuff a diverse and changing country to old and unwelcome principles—a colonial-era right to bear arms, or, as Justice Thomas has proposed, a constitutional ban on most federal environmental law (ecology having been far from the Founders’ minds).

But even saying that originalism keeps us trapped in the past takes it too much on its own terms: What it does, rather, is carry us into the future in the way preferred by a handful of right-wing jurists. Its appeals to a certain kind of constitutional democracy do not make it any less a version of judicial oligarchy. Originalism is not conservative in the sense of preserving legal principle. Rather, it is radical: a recipe for uprooting key features of modern law, including (at least) labor and safety regulations as well as environmental law. And originalists have no special mind-meld with the founding generation or with constitutional principle. Like anyone else playing the judicial-review game, they decide questions of fundamental law through the votes of nine politically connected judges.

The real irony in originalism’s march to the heights of judicial power is that, under the banner of loyalty to law, history, and the prerogatives of democracy, originalists (and the rest of the conservative legal movement) pursued a strategy that showed just the opposite conviction: In an oligarchy, power belongs to those who choose and train the oligarchs. Over more than four decades, the Federalist Society has recruited, trained, and placed a right-wing legal elite in the country’s top institutions. It has done so because conservatives in the 1970s—the last decade when it was really possible to regard courts as vehicles of broad progressive reform—saw the legal profession as suffused with broadly liberal politics and jurisprudence. Legal liberals regarded their hegemony as the natural and proper state of the law. They recruited, trained, and placed their own legal elite, and thus provided the model for right-wing institution-building. The difference was that many liberals had grown complacent enough to forget that they were engaged in an ideological battle for control of oligarchic institutions. The conservative insurrectionaries did not forget.

Both originalism and living constitutionalism are versions of judicial oligarchy, fought out in battles for control of the courts. They cannot be anything else in a country with a frozen Constitution and partisan courts. The judicial opinions that the public reads are a kind of bookkeeping, documenting the balance of power. The Dobbsopinion had been written for years, in originalist dissents from abortion cases, in Federalist Society talks and journals. Justice Alito’s 79 pages, plus appendices, is how the Supreme Court writes “6–3.” That is six votes out of some 330 million Americans. But then again, Obergefellhad only five.

So do we need to line up with our preferred oligarchs and fight like hell for control of judicial seats? Quite understandably, this has been the progressive attitude. It has the virtue of pragmatism. But it has the vice of accepting that we live under a basically undemocratic Constitution.

A more directly democratic approach would bring that pregnant phrase “We the People” back to life in the 21st century. This would mean amending Article V so that living generations could amend the Constitution and make a fundamental law that is actually our law.

The concrete results could be dramatic. Based on public-opinion polling, they might well include reinstating a baseline national abortion right, allowing for gun regulation that promotes public safety, and reauthorizing Congress and state legislatures to limit the campaign spending of corporations and wealthy individuals. Constitutional amendment could reform or eliminate the Electoral College, empowering national majorities to choose the president. It would be an opportunity to take on gerrymandering for House seats and the Senate’s two-seat-per-state structure—both major vehicles for minority rule.

There would be a more basic benefit too. A constitution makes democratic sense as a fundamental law, a limit on what legislatures and executives and even majorities of citizens can do with government power, if and only if those who live with it can consent to it when they wish, and change it otherwise. This was very clear to some of our Constitution’s Framers, such as James Wilson (also an early Supreme Court justice), who insisted that “the people” would be able to change the Constitution “whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them.”

Although James Madison wrote that the Constitution he did so much to design was marked by “the total of exclusion of the people in their collective capacity” from any share in government—that is, our system boxes out direct democracy—he also held that the power “to alter or abolish its established government” always resided with the majority. (He justified the Constitution’s arcane amendment process by denying that the United States was a nation; he considered it a hybrid of a nation and a confederation—a position that far fewer citizens would find plausible today than in 1787.) To boil it down: Constitutional commitments have authority, as the Constitution’s first words indicate, because they are the people’s commitments.

It’s fine and good for judges to enforce these commitments and inevitably disagree about their meaning, as long as the people can give the final word. Originalism’s basic problem is that living generations have no real way of consenting to the old Constitution. Living constitutionalism’s basic problem is that living generations have no decisive way of stating what fundamental law they would prefer. Enhancing the democratic power to change or reaffirm the Constitution would solve both problems—and dissolve the need for both originalism and living constitutionalism as we know them.

How should we go about changing the Constitution, if we could? There is a lot of value in giving constitutional change a separate track from ordinary politics, so it does not become just another partisan football. Constitutional principles should come from the people in a different sense than laws, presidential elections, or midterms do. One way would be to hold a constitutional convention every generation, staffed by a blend of specially elected delegates, senior public officials, and, perhaps, citizens selected jury-style to represent everyday experience. The convention might proceed in two stages: state, local, or regional versions channeling their results and some of their personnel into a national convention. The convention would propose any constitutional changes its members endorsed, which would then go to a special national referendum. Offered, say, a proposal to reinstate Roe, authorize campaign-finance regulation, or rebalance the Senate, the people would speak via this process as a “we.”

Constitutional conventions have about the same odor in liberal circles as “citizen sheriffs” and the posse comitatus—cranky tricorne-hat stuff interesting only to the populist right. This impression gets a boost from the ongoing conservative effort to call a convention through state legislatures, with the goal of amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget, term limits for federal regulators, and perhaps some other right-wing goals. But nothing about constitutional revision is intrinsically conservative—quite the contrary—and if it seems cranky, that is only because liberals became too comfortable with the idea that the Constitution was basically democratic enough and that the courts were politically congenial. Those conceits are hard to sustain now.

The most basic reason for constitutional change is not partisan at all, despite the fact that the right benefits from a frozen, anti-majoritarian Constitution and liberals are currently angry at the Supreme Court. Re-creating a constitutional politics for living citizens would make democratic self-rule a reality for everyone. The highest civic compliment we could pay one another would be to prefer the results of deliberation and voting today to an old Constitution interpreted by a few judges.

Could it really happen? After all, we start out in the world of Article V’s high barrier to change.

The first thing to see is that it will never happen if we don’t think it will. Mass movements for constitutional change did succeed in the past, before all constitutional politics went to the courts. Mobilized citizens stripped the power to appoint senators from their state legislatures (and forced those same legislatures to ratify the change), authorized a federal income tax, granted women the vote, and, for better or worse, adopted and then repealed Prohibition.

Second, as noted, important constitutional Framers argued that the right to reform the Constitution belonged inalienably to the people. There is something to be said for an open, fully democratic effort to put a change to Article V directly onto a national ballot, to stand or fall with the choice of the living majority. Constitutional rules are important, and backroom or minoritarian coups are always illegitimate, but if a constitution is about letting a people set their own fundamental law, then the people should be able to act democratically in order to make a more democratic constitution.

What about the dangers of majority rule? Generations of Americans have learned that constitutional barriers protect us from the tyranny of the majority. Would a more democratic Constitution dissolve those barriers?

There is no reason to expect that it would. A periodic convention to reassess the Constitution is a far cry from rolling referenda on whatever question arouses a moment’s passion. The First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the equal-protection clause, and so forth would be re-ratified in almost any imaginable constitutional process—perhaps with some clarification that, for instance, “freedom of speech” does not mean unlimited money in politics. In any case, if majorities really wanted to reject these principles root and branch, courts would not save them from themselves for long.

Any government can hurt people. Power is always dangerous. Recent Supreme Court decisions are a reminder that channeling power through old texts and the decisions of robed lawyers does not mean it ceases being power. Democracy is the gamble that, all things considered, we are our own best rulers, and can trust one another further than we can trust any version of minority rule—judicial, geographic, class, or otherwise. To come closer to that principle, we need a Constitution that empowers us, the people (no need for capitalization), to set our own fundamental law.

About the author: Jedediah Britton-Purdy is a professor at Duke Law School. His books include AfterNature and This Land Is Our Land, and, most recently, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope.2022

---

no lnx vid ymail 10 24

Southern Company is promoting “propaganda” disguised as research — with help from a major media company

The utility is laundering strategic messaging about the energy transition through a partnership with The Atlantic's marketing team.

Emily Sanders

Oct 28

As I was writing about the first local government to sue a gas utility for climate deception, I received a message in my LinkedIn inbox from another major power provider — Southern Company, a utility holding company heavily invested in gas throughout the South.

The message promised “exclusive insights” about the clean energy transition, and it took me to a page titled “Why Net Zero isn’t Zero-Sum” on the website of The Atlantic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine. Southern Company partnered with Atlantic Insights, the marketing research team at The Atlantic, for a downloadable “white paper” that quotes anonymous corporate executives, board members, and public sector leaders on their views about the energy transition. The paper argues that the lack of progress in addressing climate change can be attributed to “misalignment” between the public and private sectors, who “often point fingers at each other.” It promotes collaboration between governments and companies, who can work together to develop clean energy sources.

“It’s our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to harness our own energy and map an actionable path forward, with an awareness that pointing fingers is an inexcusable form of inaction, and that net zero is a promise we must keep for the well-being of the planet’s citizens, communities, businesses, and economies,” the paper concludes.

The message behind the sponsored content is a common refrain among fossil fuel companies: don’t blame private industry for a lack of climate progress, because we are all responsible. It does not mention the swell of lawsuits that accuse fossil fuel companies, and most recently, a utility company, of deceiving the public and policymakers and obstructing climate action for decades, and of making false promises about their role in solutions today.

Instead, the partnership combines two tactics fossil fuel companies have long used to launder their image and promote their vision for the future: sponsoring research to redirect conversations about the energy transition (i.e. who should be involved, and what counts as clean energy), and sponsoring content in mainstream media outlets to disguise their messaging as journalistic and credible.

For decades, mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times ran fossil fuel industry “advertorials” — ads disguised as opinion pieces — that undercut and downplayed climate science. Today, leading outlets are creating branded content for fossil fuel companies that mislead readers about the companies’ commitments to the energy transition and industry-backed “solutions.” A report from DeSmog and Drilled, which analyzed sponsored content in major outlets between 2020 and 2023, found “a media industry that repeatedly helps fossil fuel companies contradict the information climate reporters are sharing with the public.”

Southern Company’s white paper is a “native advertisement that The Atlantic's in-house content studio has created on behalf of their client, Southern Company,” and “nothing more than a propaganda effort that The Atlantic name confers legitimacy to,” said Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of journalism studies and advertising at Boston University who specializes in researching misinformation. “It is not independent, peer-reviewed research. It is marketing research which, fundamentally, is used to market products,” Amazeen said. The partnership “is in the best interest of Southern Company rather than the public interest.”

For its part, The Atlantic acknowledged that the collaboration with Southern Company was a marketing effort. Anna Bross, a senior vice president of communications at The Atlantic, told me that “Atlantic Insights is the marketing research division of The Atlantic. To be sure there is no confusion, Insights is part of our sales and marketing team, separate and independent from our editorial division.”

The Atlantic has partnered with Southern Company on marketing before, including through The Atlantic Ideas Festival, which is billed as “addressing the most significant issues of our time with today’s boldest thinkers as we bring The Atlantic’s journalism to life onstage.” This year, Southern Company is an underwriter of the festival; in 2022 and 2023, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, interviewed the company’s CEOs about the transition to clean energy. Those interviews were “distinct and separate from the editorial interviews at the Festival, and clearly delineated, introduced, and labeled as such,” said Bross.

Bross also pointed me to guidelines that cover the outlet’s advertising, “including very clear labeling, fonts, and branding — so as to distinguish advertising from our journalism.” But while Amazeen said guidelines are an important first step, her research shows that such distinctions aren’t often appreciated — or even noticed — by the readers that sponsored content is intended to reach. “Publishers can (and do) say whatever they want about clear labeling,” she said. “What really matters is whether audiences can make this distinction.”

(When I asked Bross if blurred lines were a concern for The Atlantic, she responded that the outlet “fundamentally rejects” that characterization due to its labeling and that its audience is “incredibly sophisticated” and able to distinguish between the two.)

Southern Company’s “denial and delay”

Utilities like Southern Company — and the outlets that partner with them — have largely escaped criticism for greenwashing their role in the climate crisis. “What Southern Company is doing in terms of lobbying to fight this transition really deserves a lot more of a spotlight,” said Neil Sardana, an organizer at Georgia Conservation Voters.

For many advocates and researchers working in the states where it operates, Southern Company is one of the last entities you’d want to trust to deliver guidance on the clean energy transition. The company has a “long history in climate denial and delay,” said Daniel Tait, a research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, which published a report in 2022 documenting Southern Company’s early knowledge about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and decades-long disinformation campaigns to curb climate action. Tait, who is also the executive of Energy Alabama, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy in the state, says Southern Company is still undermining the energy transition today.

They are building new gas-burning units, still rely on coal for power, and are actively blocking clean energy solutions like solar, he said.

Southern Company’s Alabama subsidiary, Alabama Power, has imposed a charge on rooftop solar panel owners, which is being challenged in court, as well as a tax on large-scale producers of solar energy. The company is also known by local advocates for its prolific dumping of toxic coal ash and for operating the most greenhouse gas-intensive power plant in the nation, located in West Jefferson, Alabama. Southern Company uses hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to run a carbon capture testing and research center in Wilsonville, Alabama, even after the company was investigated for fraud, sued, and forced to refund $377 million to ratepayers for its failed carbon capture project at a coal plant in Kemper County, Mississippi.

Ramsey Sprague, President of the Alabama-based Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition, described Alabama Power as “vampiric,” and said it suppresses renewable energy generation in the state, pledges to mitigate its pollution via “unproven” carbon capture technologies, and “fleeces its customers” for the benefit of investors on Wall Street. A 2023 study found that Alabamians have the highest electricity bills in the United States.

Jilisa Milton, a co-director at the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution, found Southern Company’s promotion of public-private partnerships around the energy transition ironic. “I don’t think they’ve ever invited us to have that conversation,” she said about Alabama Power. “We’ve tried to engage executives — there’s not really a channel for that.”

Southern Company has a very different version of its role in climate change, maintaining that gas is essential for a clean energy transition. “Natural gas and the infrastructure that transports it are foundational to achieving a sustainable future where energy is clean, safe, reliable and affordable,” reads its website. (Methane, the primary component of gas, is an even more potent greenhouse gas pollutant than carbon dioxide.)

Alabama Power says it gets nearly a third of its power from clean energy. But the Sierra Club gave Southern Company an “F” grade — zero out of 100 — in a report that scores utilities on their energy transition plans.

“The reality from their operating companies in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia just does not match the rhetoric whatsoever,” said Sardana, who noted that Georgia Power is expanding fossil fuel generation in the state. “We see how much influence Southern Company has gained within our state and federally in terms of pushing back against climate regulations and protecting fossil fuels.”

After Hurricane Helene struck in September, thousands of Georgia residents went without power or running water for nearly three weeks. Southern Company has touted its recovery efforts in the area — but by keeping Georgia’s grid reliant on coal and gas infrastructure, Sardana said, the utility left residents more vulnerable to outages, not to mention that burning fossil fuels increases the damage caused by hurricanes like Helene.

“To me, you can’t completely divorce the issue of fueling climate change and then having to recover from the damage when climate devastation takes place,” Sardana said.

Media’s role

Its partnership with The Atlantic isn’t the first time Southern Company has used media funding to bolster its image. Floodlight News found that Southern Company subsidiary Alabama Power finances two news outlets in the state — a digital news service founded by the utility, and a Black newspaper bought by its philanthropic foundation. According to Floodlight’s analysis, the news center “publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company,” while the newspaper's coverage of Alabama Power consists of reprinted stories from the news center and the utility’s own press releases.

Various fossil fuel and utility interests across the country are now funding struggling local news outlets to sway public opinion about their operations.

Sponsored content and advertising partnerships offer corporate interests a similar opportunity. According to Amazeen’s research, not only are readers often deceived by the advertisements news outlets create for brands, thinking they are legitimate news, but news outlets are also less likely to report on companies that paid them to create branded content.

In response to my questions about their partnership with Southern Company, The Atlantic’s Bross said their editorial team was fully independent from sponsored content — a standard practice in newsrooms — and that “advertising relationships do not affect how we cover any company.” But when I asked whether The Atlantic has ever reported on Southern Company outside of those partnerships, Bross did not provide any examples.

“It's difficult to hold powerful interests to account if news organizations won't report on them out of fear of losing an advertiser,” Amazeen told me. “At a time when facts are under siege, disinformation is ascendent, and when the public should be turning to traditional news sources for accurate, vetted information, I am concerned that news publishers are adding to the confusion and eroding their own legitimacy by blurring commercial and journalistic content.”

---

veteran of the United States Department of Justice recently wrote that despite the unprecedented nature of a former American president facing criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions, the prosecutions of Trump should be celebrated as a win for democracy.

In a December 7 essay for **The Atlantic, Donald Ayer — a former deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush — wrote that even though the final outcome is unknown, former President Donald Trump's ongoing criminal proceedings in state and federal courts still prove the supremacy of the American judicial system.

"These three pending criminal cases—and the civil cases involving E. Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general’s allegations of systematic business fraud—all show [Trump], day by day as events unfold, to be subject like everyone else to society’s rules of conduct," Ayer wrote. "Not only the convictions that may well result, but the judicial proceedings themselves are graphic demonstrations for all to see that our democratic rule of law, and not Donald Trump, is indeed supreme."

He continued, "The filing of charges in any criminal case is a watershed moment, ending what may be many months or years of laborious investigation with no predictable outcome. A criminal indictment states the claims of society against the defendant. At that point, the rights of both the defendant and the public to a speedy trial kick in, and the flow of events becomes more orderly and predictable."

Ayer lauded the by-the-book approach that the Biden administration took to its predecessor, despite taking office just weeks after the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol. He remarked at how President Joe Biden took office prioritizing the distribution and avaiability of the Covid-19 vaccine and getting America through the pandemic over punishing Trump. He also noted how Attorney General Merrick Garland carefully avoided the political obstacles of spearheading Trump investigations himself, opting instead to leave that job to special counsel Jack Smith. Ayer also touched on the Garland "concern" for restoring the norms of the DOJ.

"That concern also counseled that initial enforcement efforts relating to the events of January 6 should focus most attention on the violent offenders, against whom cases could most readily be made, with the idea of following leads upward to ultimately reach the organizers and leaders," Ayer wrote. "The earnest pursuit of that project led to more than 500 arrests within six months of January 6, and ultimately made it the largest investigation in the department’s history, with charges filed againstwell over 1,000 defendants in almost all 50 states."

Ayer concluded that the Trump investigations prove that "our rule of law is durable and works," and suggested Americans follow the guidance of former President Abraham Lincoln when he said the rule of law should be made "the political religion of the Nation."

*Click here to read Ayer's full essay.

---

AN 12 23

When the religious right became a prominent part of the Republican Party in the early 1980s, both liberals and conservatives sounded the alarm.

Television producer Norman Lear, who died on December 5 away at the age of 101, founded People for the American Way to combat the religious right. Conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) was a scathing critic of Jerry Falwell Sr., the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson and warned that no good could come of the GOP's alliance with far-right white evangelicals.

But the GOP's alliance with white Christian fundamentalists continues after more than 40 years — an alliance that journalist Tim Alberta is vehemently critical of in his new book

"The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism."

Alberta discussed the book during an interview with Religion News' Karen Swallow Prior published in Q&A form on December 11.

"In the vast majority of cases — whether it's Ralph Reed or Robert Jeffress or even Greg Locke — I have walked away from long, searching interviews convinced they've made a decision, a business decision, to indulge a lot of foolishness," Alberta told Religion News. "Why? Because in their view, the ends justify the means: Trafficking in deception and hatred is a small price to pay for a seat at the table, for a culture war victory, for a reclamation of our nation's Christian heritage."

Alberta continued, "The problem is: scripture describes those ends as unimportant — while telling us, repeatedly, that the means are crucially important. In other words: How we play the game matters more than whether we win or lose. That's a message that rank-and-file evangelicals need to hear, but many of the people they look to for influence have real incentive to tell them otherwise."

Alberta, known for his work for The Atlantic, laments that right-wing media have "conditioned many evangelicals to be angry, fearful, antagonistic" and embrace "political extremism."

Alberta told Religion News, "The church's great weakness at an institutional level — and to be clear, this is common among all institutions — is an unwillingness, and perhaps more commonly an inability, to police itself. We have seen this time and again."

*Read Religion News' full interview with Tim Albertaat this link.

Daily Caller News Foundation

CKF’s largest media grant in 2018, $746,250, went to the Daily Caller News Foundation. While less than the $960,000 it gave a year before, it was still Koch’s biggest contribution to a media organization last year, as it has been since 2015.

On Nov. 11, the Daily Caller News Foundation uploaded a mashup video to YouTube that included a clip of a neo-Nazi rapping about his support for President Donald Trump. In the verse of the original video that followed the clip used by Daily Caller, the neo-Nazi rapped about the “Great Replacement,” a central white nationalist propaganda theory that claims immigrants of color will replace white populations.

This wasn’t the first time the Daily Caller has been linked to white supremacy; it has published several white supremacists and antisemites and has had some on staff.

After a November 2018 Sludge report on the Koch foundations’ funding of pro-Trump media, three CKF top officials claimed to Washington Post opinion writer and Reason alumnus Radley Balko that, “they personally and the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson.”The officials argued that the CFK funding went towards writer fellowships for articles that are made available by wire to a broader range of news outlets. It is not publicly known whether CFK has funded the Daily Caller News Foundation this year.

The Daily Caller New Foundation’s 2018 revenue numbers aren’t yet public, but CKF’s donations in 2016 amounted to 84 percent of the foundation’s annual contribution total.

RealClear

Two entities of the conservative media operation RealClear got money from the Koch foundations in 2018. The Real Clear Foundation, which funds RealClearInvestigations and “news aggregation and content creation that is in the public good,” according to tax records, received a $375,000 consulting contract from CKI.

RealClearPolitics, the company’s news, opinion, and poll aggregation website, and CKI teamed up to poll the public and veterans on military intervention and specific wars in 2017 and 2018. Also in 2017, the website published a piece critical of activists organizing against a Koch-funded center at Wake Forest University. RealClearPolitics accepts trainees from CKI’s Media and Journalism Fellowship program “with no strings attached.”

RealClearPolitics got $75,000 from CKF in 2018. Neither entity received money from the Koch foundations from 2015-17. RealClearPolitics published an op-ed from CKF official Will Ruger in October 2018 and another by Sarah Ruger, director of free expression at CKF, this June.

RealClear Foundation has been funded by right-wing megadonors for years. In fiscal year 2013, the sole disclosed donor was Nelson Broms, an insurance executive who co-founded the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute, who gave $50,000. By FY2016, the Real Clear Foundation had significantly increased its fundraising ability, getting $2,250,000 from the Koch-tied DonorsTrust. CMD has tracked over $5.5 million in Real Clear Foundation funding since April 2013, including $1 million from the similarly Koch-tied Donors Capital Fund and six-figure amounts from conservative megadonor foundations in the Koch funding network, such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

[graf]

RealClearPolitics co-founder John McIntyre is tied to the far-right Federalist website. He and his wife, Jenn, are listed as directors of The Federalist on a 2017 securities offering filing, alongside co-founders Ben Domenech, who is married to Meghan McCain, and Sean Davis. Jenn McIntyre is also listed as an executive for The Federalist, which is not connected to the Koch-funded Federalist Society.

Center-Left Publications

The foundation of Charles Koch, whose political network has installed scores of right-wing state and federal lawmakers and funded ideological free-market centers and conservative student groups on college campuses, began funding initiatives in 2018 to counter the political polarization that it has catalyzed.

On its 2018 tax return, CKF listed a $300,000 contract with The Atlantic Monthly Group, which publishes The Atlantic.

The Atlantic magazine has a long history of publishing liberal and centrist writers. Since the conservative-friendly Jeffrey Goldberg took the reins in late 2016, the publication has devoted its pages to stories questioning political correctness on college campuses, criticizing the #MeToo movement, anddefending controversial figures such as Jordan Peterson.

Peterson has been accused of misogyny, bigotry, and conspiracy theorizing. Conservative New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss interviewed Peterson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is presented by Atlantic Live and supported by Koch Industries and the foundation of GOP megadonor Paul Singer.

Goldberg even briefly hired extreme misogynist Kevin Williamson, whom he first defended and then let go under enormous public pressure. Still, the publication is seen as part of the liberal media sphere.

On Nov. 28, The Atlantic kicked off a year-long series, “The Speech Wars,” which was underwritten by CKF, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute. The series presents “a marketplace for competing ideas,” said Goldberg. CKF is “excited” to “[support] The Atlantic‘s expansion of their courageous and nuanced coverage of growing polarization,” said CKF’s Ruger. “America’s an increasingly diverse nation, and we can be better for our differences. Dedicated efforts like The Atlantic‘s stand to deepen our understanding and ultimately address barriers to that peaceful and productive pluralism.”

A larger 2018 contract, $500,000 from CKI, went to Ozy Media, a company “tailor-made for the Change Generation–people from every corner of the globe who are challenging the status quo and bucking convention.” The money supported a PBS primetime series, “Take On America,” which has a similar theme to The Atlantic series: It “provides participants an opportunity to take a pause from the growing polarization by joining town hall meetings across the country.” Ozy CEO Carlos Watson, who co-founded the company with former Goldman Sachs associate Samir Rao, hosts the series, which is also funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

In addition to contracting with two media companies with liberal audiences, CKF also partnered with the Poynter Institute, a mainstream journalist education nonprofit, which it gave $225,000 in 2018. A year earlier, CKF gave Poynter its first grant, worth $75,000, to launch the Poynter College Media Project, a campus-based initiative that “encourage[s] the student press to use journalism to navigate divisive issues.”

The Koch operation, which has surveilled and attempted to smear well-known reporters such as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, has a new line about journalism. “Media plays a vital role in the free flow of knowledge essential to society,” said Ruger. “Poynter’s program takes that one step further, highlighting the critical and continuing role a free press has in facilitating conversations on even our most difficult issues.”

This April, Poynter announced the Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism Fellowship, sponsored by CKI.

State Policy Network Associates

The Koch foundations donated to State Policy Network members the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation ($463,000) and, the Moving Picture Institute ($384,000) in 2018. The Reason Foundation, which had the late David Koch on its board, has received millions of dollars from several Koch family foundations over time. In recent years, Koch donation amounts have jumped around, but 2018’s total is roughly $135,000 more than the previous year.

The Moving Picture Institute is a New York City-based “modern-media production house and talent incubator that creates and supports high-impact film and video content designed to entertain, inspire, and educate audiences with captivating stories about human freedom,” according to its website. In addition to Koch funding, the institute has received funds from other key right-wing sources including DonorsTrust and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. It has produced films and video series attacking environmental activists, explaining various aspects of economics, and questioning regulation.

Other major recipients of money from the Koch foundations in 2018 include, the National Freedom of Information Coalition ($118,000), and the Student Free Press Association ($88,000), which operates the conservative College Fix website with content from student journalists who “commit themselves to the principles of a free society.” The group has also received funding from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. Right-wing megadonor and current Education Sec. Betsy DeVos’s son, Rick, was on the Student Free Press Association board as of 2017.

Conservative outlets The American Spectator ($7,700 from CKF) and National Review ($6,000 from CKI) got smaller amounts through their connected foundations in 2018.

Dato' Sri Haji Mohammad Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak (Jawi: محمد نجيب بن عبدالرازق; born 23 July 1953) is a Malaysian politician who served as the 6th Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2009 to 2018. He was the former President of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the leading party in Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which maintained control of Malaysia's government as a parliamentary majority for more than sixty years until the coalition's defeat in the 2018 general election.

On 3 July 2018, Najib was arrested by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), investigating how RM42 million (US$10.6 million) went from SRC International into Najib's bank account. Police seized 1,400 necklaces, 567 handbags, 423 watches, 2,200 rings, 1,600 brooches and 14 tiaras worth $273 million.^[2]

http://www.sarawakreport.org/2011/08/fbc-media-scandal-hits-the-usa/

no lnx docs [comments section interesting]

SECURE KEY CONTACT INSTRUCTIONS

Sarawak Report

FBC Media Scandal Hits The USA!

22 August 2011 31

FBC Media story starts to unravel in the US

The story of FBC Media has now hit the United States, where a number of media organisations, magazines and TV stations have had links with the company.

The political blog site Politico has been following developments as our revelations started to hit in Malaysia and the UK today it reported that the magazine Atlantic Monthly, is also launching an investigation into its own links with the company.

Atlantic habitually featured articles on the World Economic Forum, written by Alan Friedman from Davos and there are concerns he could have used this as a platform to promote his clients in the same way that he used TV news programmes on CNBC and BBC World. For example, this year Friedman chose to write a gushing report on the good governance of Indonesia by its current President President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

[img gushing about prez, indo = china and india?!]

Wow! The top event at Davos this year, according to Friedman

Alan Friedman got Najib Razak a Forum event hosted by Atlantic Monthly this year

Meanwhile, the Publisher of Atlantic Monthly, Justin Smith, has also announced he is resigning from the Board of FBC Media where he has sat since 2007. He has acknowledged to Politico that the Chairman of FBC, Alan Friedman had approached him earlier this year to arrange a forum event to be hosted by the magazine, featuring Najib Razak!

This forum was held in March and was indeed hosted by Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows. It is understood that Friedman failed to inform the magazine that Najib Razak and the Malaysian [corruption charges 1019] Government were PR clients of the company. Justin Smith told Politico that:

“The truth is that Alan Friedman has been a friend of mine for nearly twenty years. In light of this friendship and my past association with the company, I am very disturbed to learn of the serious allegations being raised about FBC and Alan’s conduct. What I would particularly regret, should these accusations directed at FBC be proven true, is my role in having introduced Alan to The Atlantic’s editors and event planners.

“I have directed a full review of The Atlantic’s dealings with him, and the responsibility at The Atlantic for any problems it might uncover will be mine. It is my job to safeguard at all costs The Atlantic’s reputation for editorial integrity.” [Politico 22.08.2011]

Other media outlets that have been linked to events by FBC Media are Bloomberg’s Business Week Magazine, which runs the European Leaders Forum and the International Herald Tribune, where Alan Friedman formally worked as a correspondent. Both magazines were listed in FBC’s promotional material as potential ‘media platforms’ for their PR clients, which included the State of Malaysia which has paid over RM 57 million of taxpayers money to FBC over the past two years according to budget records.

Clients like Najib and Taib were offered all these ‘media platforms’ by FBC Media. But did these outlets know that they were being used in this way?

SarawakReport

---

quite good

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/**2015/**06/what-matters-inequality-or-opportuniy/393272/

no lnx

Lately, one argument that’s been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, “I don’t care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality.” Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.

These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation—too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.

But it’s not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.

For many in the opportunity-not-inequality camp, the relationship between the two concepts is an inconvenient truth. Concerns about inequality smack of “class warfare,” of “going after” the top 1 percent and Wall Street.Cowen is revealing in this regard: “The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.”

Many politicians and analysts would rather not address the power imbalances that have channeled so much of our economic growth to the highest-income families. They are much more comfortable focusing on the benign-sounding theme of “wealth creation” or insisting that economic growth alone can improve mobility without any redistribution of resources or political power, as if “a rising tide can lift all boats” matters when a few people are in yachts and many are stuck in dinghies.

But a growing body of research shows strong links among inequality, poverty, and opportunity. For example, new research by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute reveals that of the factors most commonly cited as driving poverty in America—education, family structure, race and more (see chart below)—the number-one factor by far is the growth in inequality, which added seven percentage points to the poverty rate since the late 1970s.

So why is that? How is it that inequality reduces mobility and deepens poverty?

* * *

The relationship between childhood family income and life outcomes is well-established. Socioeconomic status is unfortunately the strongest predictor of a child’s academic achievement, as decades of social science research have found. A child’s income rank—her family’s income relative to the household income of other families—makes a difference for that child’s future adult-income rank as well. Research by Raj Chetty of Harvard and his colleagues links every 10-percentile-point gain in childhood income rank with a 3.4-percentile-point gain in income rank as an adult. Since inequality by definition means that less income will reach poor and middle class Americans for any given rate of economic growth, these facts alone highlight inequality’s relevance to mobility discussions.

In addition, a large and growing body of evidence, recently reviewed by Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly connects inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. As shown in the figure below, Bradbury and Triest find a significant, negative relationship between living in an area with greater income inequality and children’s expected upward mobility.

The Relationship Between Inequality and Mobility

[no grafs]

Commuting zones with greater inequality have reduced expected upward mobility for low-income children (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)]

It’s critical to understand the fundamental difference between these findings and the Cowen, Rubio, et al. view that America can address poverty without addressing inequality. As just noted,rising inequality implies that the income and wealth generated by GDP and productivity growth increasingly flow to those at the very top of the scale. As a result, relatively fewer resources reach everyone else. One thus would expect to see low-income families less able (relative to the wealthy ones) to invest in children’s futures, more indebted if they tried to go to college, more likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that lack opportunity, and more likely to experience the stressors that do permanent damage to children’s later educational and earnings outcomes.

And that’s exactly what happens.

Research indicates at least three causal pathways via which inequality constrains opportunity for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

First, inequality is driving increasing residential segregation by income. The shares of families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and neighborhoods of concentrated wealth both more than doubled between 1970 and 2009, while the share of families in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 42 percent. Those high-poverty neighborhoods—where more and more families are living—create lasting disadvantages for many who grow up there: If a family with young children (less than age 13) relocates from a high- to a low-poverty neighborhood, the kids achieve better academic and economic outcomes later in life, as new work by Chetty et al. indicates.

Second, inequality leads to unequal access to quality educational experiences throughout a child’s lifetime. Over the period of growing inequality, these disparities have increased. In 1995, for example, families with education debt in the bottom half of the net worth distribution (a broader definition of income, including assets minus liabilities) had a mean debt-to-income ratio of around 0.26, meaning that for every dollar of their income, they owed 26 cents in college debt. For families in the top 5 percent, that ratio was eight cents on the dollar. But by 2013, the debt-to-income ratio had more than doubled to 0.58 for the bottom half (some of whom are poor but many of whom are middle class) while remaining unchanged for those at the top.

Third, and most importantly, inequality directly undermines equality of opportunity, likely through a variety of mechanisms.As the gap between the rich and poor widens, lower-income families have less ability relative to their rich counterparts to invest in enrichment goods for their children. Children from families with less income have relatively less extensive and privileged social networks and, compared to their rich peers, are more likely to experience the type of "toxic" stress that can hamper brain development and long term academic, health, and economic outcomes.

In short, inequality entrenches immobility not just by enabling increasingly unequal transfers of wealth from one generation to the next, but also through a number of more subtle pathways that affect opportunity on a daily basis. It may not yet be possible to explain all of these subtle pathways with great certainty, but the fact that “rich and poor children score very differently on school readiness tests before they enter kindergarten” should be viewed as an unsurprising consequence of the high levels of inequality American society currently tolerates.

Members of the “don’t-mess-with-the-rich-to-help-the-poor” crowd also ignore the political dimension of inequality. While Rubio, Paul Ryan, and others are professing their concern for the poor, they’re busy trying to repeal the estate tax (at a cost of $270 billion over 10 years) and writing budgets that gut the safety net. These policies restrict mobility at both the bottom and top by exacerbating the burdens of being poor, increasing the privilege of being born into riches, and eliminating revenue sources for investments that might begin to reverse the inequality of opportunity. Why do politicians pursue such policies? Because they are nudged along by the interests of wealthy donors. Inequality begets greater inequality.

In other words, disadvantages faced by children in low- and middle-income families and advantages held by their wealthy peers are two sides of the same coin. The lack of opportunity for those in poverty is not some separate problem from the unequal distribution of wealth and income across society.

* * *

Boosting mobility therefore requires directly addressing residential segregation, educational access, and other barriers described above. Here are some ideas that hold promise:

One conclusion that stems from the Chetty et al. findings regarding the benefits of moving from high- to low-poverty areas is to improve the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program. Housing analysts Barbara Sard and Doug Rice recently detailed a number of specific, straightforward changes that could eliminate barriers for voucher recipients to move into low-poverty areas, including tying voucher subsidies to rent in specific zip codes instead of entire metropolitan areas. Importantly, such a change could be implemented without significant funding or even congressional action, and HUD has just announced that it is considering doing so.

https://www.alternet.org/media/kevin-williamsons-ousting-atlantic-reveals-major-hypocrisy-conservative-media

media junkies among you may have heard that the Atlantic has fired Kevin D. Williamson, who previously wrote for the National Review. Williamson was best known for his racist, dehumanizing and unhinged screeds about people of color, women and working folks. Yet reading the conservative ire about Williamson’s ousting would make one think an unspeakable war crime has taken place.

One doesn't need to dig deep into Williamson’s bilious polemics to realize that the man harbors some pretty awful ideas about how societies should be governed. Writing in the National Review in 2016, Williamson called poor white Trump-supporting communities “negative assets" that should relieve society of their weight. Paraphrasing won’t do him justice, so here’s the right-winger’s rant in its full glory:

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.”

Williamson has also previously said he supports hanging women who get abortions; once compared a black child to a primate; and hoped that America was waterboarding people.

This is the man that the Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg enthusiastically brought on to write for the outlet — at least initially. Goldberg wrote in a staff memo, "What am I trying to accomplish by having Kevin write for us? The first answer is this: He’s an excellent reporter who covers parts of the country, and aspects of American life, that we don’t yet cover comprehensively.” Goldberg added that he was keen to listen to conservatives like Williamson who had been “made ideologically homeless by the rise of Trump.”

Goldberg's fixation with Williamson is part of a larger trend in legacy media where publications hire Never Trump conservatives, a social brand formed as a reaction among those on the right who dislike Trump more because he is a PR liability rather than because he lacks a sound moral constitution.

The conservative gripe seems to be that Williamson is yet another victim of a ruthless leftist campaign orchestrated to hunt conservatives down. For an ideological camp that enjoys boasting about its imaginary commitment to “facts over feelings,” conservatives have failed to address three issues.

First of all, while the First Amendment protects free speech, it does not guarantee one employment at the Atlantic. Editorial boards—even ones like Goldberg’s that made a completely avoidable error in hiring Williamson—maintain the right to draw the line at unacceptable content.

Thirdly and most importantly, offended conservatives need to name at least three hardcore leftists hired by right-wing publications. If not three, even one will do. If the right indeed supports free speech and ideological diversity, they should have hired someone like George Ciccariello-Maher, who was pressured to resign from his post as associate professor of Drexel University after his sarcastic tweet mocking the non-existent “white genocide." Unless the Federalist, Drudge Report, Daily Caller, National Review, the Weekly Standard or Fox News hires Ciccariello-Maher in the next week, conservatives’ incessant bleating about the death of free speech is mere hypocrisy masquerading as sanctimonious indignation. Secondly, there is a demonstrable difference between diversity of thought and openly advocating for killing people — even anti-choice organizations reportedly distanced themselves from Williamson’s stance on abortion. Maybe Williamson can learn the language of plausible deniability to mask his morally unsound rhetoric; it’s an approach that seems to be working for the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, who suggested people run toward mass shooters after Sandy Hook and the New York Times’ Bret Stephens who doesn’t believe in climate change and called Black Lives Matter “really thuggish."

In the meantime, Williamson, the current icon of martyrdom for conservatives, can check if Breitbart will take him. There’s a high probability that they’ll get along just fine. Mehreen Kasana

---

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-are-major-newspapers-and-magazines-hiring-so-many-right-wing-cranks

something charming and retrograde about the shrieking chorus that erupts online every time a major newspaper or legacy magazine hires some new dumbass to write opinions a few times a week. We all get to pretend that any of this still matters, that it’s not all just whistling into the void in a universe where a functionally illiterate American president gets all his information from a garish morning program, and your 60-something moms and dads receive their news from chain-letter-quality Facebook memes. Even those of us who still peruse the opinion pages can’t remember the last thing we read there. Even those of us who write this stuff are pressed to pretend it’s anything other than more frothy ephemera bobbing on the surface of a vast, rising ocean of content.

Many of the most loudly contested recent hires have been of so-called Never Trump conservatives, a cohort of exactly four-dozen people in three zip codes. Fortunately for them, they do have a natural constituency, which consists entirely of the editors of prestige publications. These are people—both the posturing writers and the editors who hire them—with an abiding commitment to the line that our current president represents the inception of something entirely new and gross in our political system, which allows them to conveniently elide the racist savagery of American politics, and American conservativism in particular, more or less from the get-go.

The Atlantic, for instance, whose stable of writers includes former George W. Bush speechwriter #NeverTrumper David Frum, just hired Kevin D. Williamson. A former National Review writer, Williamson was swiftly taken to task on Twitter for proposing that women who have abortions should be hanged, and for once describing an African-American boy as a “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg.” (He has since deleted his account.) You may recall another well-known American document that refers to black people by this percentage. Williamson drops this deliberate provocation (he is daring you to call him racist, so he can deny it and accuse you of a deliberately uncharitable reading) immediately after describing the boy as “raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.” ("Well, humans are primates," he would argue, if you bothered to point out that this, too, is racist trash.)

Williamson has written that dying towns should be left to die, that mobile rootlessness is the key to economic prosperity, and that price gouging after natural disasters is fine and good. These would appear to cut slightly against some of the central rhetorical commitments of conservative writing and thought, which valorizes small-town America, imagines church and family as the central institutions of communal life, and proposes that private charity could pick up the slack for disaster relief and health and human services. We should instead untangle our social networks, abandon our congregations and let Main Street go to seed as our tiny nuclear families blast around America, from one city to another, in search of some tenuous at-will job. How will we pay for the U-Haul, the motels, the first and last months’ rent? Who cares. The truth is that this only seems to cut against conservativism, whose ideals about community were never more than rhetorical, except of course when it came to race, for which the specific boundaries of particular communities retain a totemic power.

Williamson wasn’t the worst writer the Atlantic could have hired. At the National Review, where you can also encounter the fatuous Jonah Goldberg or the perpetually morally panicked David French, he is very nearly reasonable, even if he still appears slightly mad to those of us outside of the asylum. He’s merely a tedious crank. But a lot of tedious cranks seem to be popping up in the upper echelons of opinion journalism these days, and it does well to ask why.

The editors and publishers will tell you that it is so that their overwhelmingly liberal audiences may be exposed to new ideas, as if readers of the Atlantic are unaware that conservatives think affirmative action is bad and subscribers to the New York Times don’t know that there are people who pretend to think that climate change is phony. And if you are the sort of person who complains about these hires online, someone will surely pop into your Twitter mentions to remind you that the outrage machine drives lots of clicks and page views.

The truth, though, is that these columnists are all hired as part of a project of desperate make-believe, in which it is possible to imagine that Donald Trump and our present politics really are a singular event, a historic deviation. In their fantasy, there remain two broadly similar and functional political parties whose respective ideologies meet in a nebulous but desirable middle, wherein reasonable men and their reasonable institutions can yet function as they ever have. It’s a fairly rosy portrayal of American political history to begin with, but there was at least a sense that it was superficially, if only superficially, true. This genteel fiction permits the mandarins of respectable media to indulge the most preposterous fiction of them all, which is that the modern conservative movement in America isn't absolutely and irredeemably deranged.

This is not to overcredit a deeply compromised and corrupt American liberalism, especially in the form of a Democratic Party that more often than not resembles a finishing school for communications professionals and future Wall Street placeholders. But only if we pretend that a tiny cadre of idiosyncratic urban conservatives are in some way representative of even a plurality of conservative thought in this country can we imagine that at a root level, this all amounts to differing attitudes about market incentives and land use policies—that it was ever about any of that to begin with. If that is not the case, then it throws into stark relief the broader identities of these publications as largely neutral arbitrators of a national conversation, and that might mean they’d face some moral obligation to pick a side.

---

ref

The fossil fuel industry’s effort to “start winning hearts and minds” arrived at a Baptist church in North Carolina recently in the form of three $1,500 scholarships for local high school students and a talk by Hubbel Relat, a Fueling US Forward representative,at a summit hosted by the Roanoke ValleySouthern Christian Leadership Conference.

The $1,500 scholarships, which local news reports said were aimed to help the students pursue careers in the energy industry, were a part of a broader effort by Fueling US Forward to tout the “positives” of fossil fuels and to bring that message specifically to black communities.

That effort has gotten off to a rocky start. Last month, a front page New York Times feature profiled Fueling US Forward’s efforts to promote fossil fuels by getting an article published in The Atlantic (while failing to acknowledge the author’s job as a spokesperson for the group, causing the magazine’s editors to pen a public apology and add it to the top of the piece), running TV ads, and organizing feel-good events in black communities where attendees could win up to $250 off their utility bills.

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/business/energy-environment/koch-brothers-fossil-fuels-minorities.html

Alex Fitzsimmons, Author at American Energy Alliance

americanenergyalliance.org/staff/afitzsimmons/

Alex Fitzsimmons is the Manager of Policy and Public Affairs at the American Energy Alliance. In his role, Alex manages research, communications, and ...

Alex Fitzsimmons | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexfitzsimmons

Washington D.C. Metro Area - ?Energy and environmental analyst

View Alex Fitzsimmons' professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Alex Fitzsimmons discover ...

Alex Fitzsimmons, Author at IER

instituteforenergyresearch.org/about/people/alexfitzsimmons/

Aug 4, 2015 - Alex Fitzsimmons is the Manager of Policy and Public Affairs at the Institute for Energy Research. In his role, Alex manages research, ...

Tweets with replies by Alex Fitzsimmons (@AlexFitzsimmons) | Twitter

https://twitter.com/alexfitzsimmons?lang=en

The latest Tweets and replies from Alex Fitzsimmons (@AlexFitzsimmons). Energy and Environmental Analyst. Awesome things include pugs, popcorn, and ...

Alex Fitzsimmons talks Chinese wind on BBC - YouTube

Video for ALEX FITZSIMMONS? 5:32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlX5ognB9sA

Jan 9, 2014 - Uploaded by IERDC

On January 8, 2014 Alex Fitzsimmons spoke with the BBC about wind power and the effect it's having in China.

Alex Fitzsimmons Profiles | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/public/Alex-Fitzsimmons

View the profiles of people named Alex Fitzsimmons. Join Facebook to connect with Alex Fitzsimmons and others you may know. Facebook gives people the...

Images for ALEX FITZSIMMONS

Image result for ALEX FITZSIMMONS

More images for ALEX FITZSIMMONS

Report images

Alex Fitzsimmons | DeSmogBlog

https://www.desmogblog.com/alex-fitzsimmons

Alex Fitzsimmons Credentials B.A. in political science from The George Washington University. [1] Background.

All Stories by Alex Fitzsimmons - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alex-fitzsimmons/

Dec 14, 2016 - Alex Fitzsimmons is an analyst and spokesperson for Fueling U.S. Forward, an advocacy organization for domestic fossil fuels. Nguyen Huy ...

ALEX FITZSIMMONS

Will Humans Run Out of Fertilizer?

It helped people spread and multiply. Now critics worry it's destroying the planet. An Object Lesson.

Editor’s note: This article originally failed to disclose that the author is an analyst and spokesperson for Fueling U.S. Forward, an organization that advocates for the use of domestic oil and natural gas. We've updated the article to reflect that affiliation and regret the error.

“Nobody adores fertilizer,” the writer Shellen Lubin once mused. Lubin isn’t entirely correct. Bill Gates, for example, has admitted to being “a little obsessed with fertilizer.” Yes, fertilizer. The stuff you sprinkle, spray, and spread over plants to help them grow. Not the “all natural” kind that originates in the guts of farm animals, but human-made fertilizer derived from natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Most people don’t think about fertilizer, but few innovations are as central to modern life. In the 20th century, human-made fertilizer helped avert catastrophe on a massive scale. With population growth outstripping the food supply, experts predicted millions of people would starve. Fertilizer helped farmers grow more food on less land and feed a growing population, proving the experts wrong...

In case still had faith in the political media machine's integrity, several big outlets have cleared that misconception right up for you. They’ve decided to offer news interviews up for sale at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

This means these outlets not even trying to hide their sleaze anymore. As Lee Fang wrote in a July 1 article for The Intercept, which broke the story:

“For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including The Atlantic and Politico.

And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.”

The Hill newspaper, for example, is sponsoring events at both party conventions and is promising its sponsors who pay $200,000 convention interviews with The Hill editorial staffers for “up to three named executives or organization representatives of your choice,” according to a brochure obtained by The Intercept. “These interviews are pieces of earned media and will be hosted on a dedicated page on thehill.com and promoted across The Hill’s digital and social media channels,” the brochure promises.

The Hill ignored The Intercept’s inquiries, Fang wrote.

Fang's article mentionsThe Economistand its subsidiary CQ Roll Callas having similar deals on the table.

Even for big media, this is a slimy new low. These once-journalistic news organizations are undeniably morphing into paid advertising and PR for the 1-percenter corporations and billionaires who control the political lobby.

People who care even a little bit about the importance of journalistic integrity, or the checks and balances of the press—which are a necessary piece of any healthy democracy—should immediately boycott any news organization willing to stoop this low. This kind of behavior erases the already-too-fuzzy line between the news media and the moneyed class's greedy interests.

Maybe you aren’t shocked by this new low because this is simply a blatant version of what you already knew has been going on behind the scenes for years—but still. That they are so brazen about it is terrifying. What does it say about the state of the press when these well-known, long-time trusted publications are straight-up going, "Hey, rich people: ever wanted to buy off a journalist? Now's your chance!"

It's upsetting on a whole new level.

You can read the full Intercept article here.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded (as The Atlantic Monthly) in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts, now based in Washington, D.C. It was created as aliterary and cultural commentary magazine, growing to achieve a national reputation as a high-quality review with a moderate worldview.^[2] The magazine has notably recognized and published new writers and poets, as well as encouraged major careers. It has also published leading writers' commentary on abolition, education, and other major issues in contemporary political affairs. The magazine has won more National Magazine Awards than any other monthly magazine.^[3]

After experiencing financial hardship and a series of ownership changes, the magazine was reformatted as a general editorial magazine. Focusing on "foreign affairs, politics, and the economy [as well as] cultural trends", it is now primarily aimed at a target audience of serious national readers and "thought leaders".^[4][5]

The first issue of the magazine was published on November 1, 1857.^[6][7] The magazine's initiator and founder was Francis H. Underwood, an assistant to the publisher,^[8][9][10] who received less recognition than his partners because he was "neither a 'humbug' nor a Harvard man".^[11] The other founding sponsors were prominent writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Harriet Beecher Stowe; John Greenleaf Whittier; and James Russell Lowell, who served as its first editor.

In 2010, The Atlantic posted its first profit in the previous decade. In profiling the publication at the time, The New York Times noted the accomplishment was the result of "a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue."^[12]

Format, publication frequency, and name

The magazine, subscribed to by over 400,000 readers, now publishes ten times a year.^[13] As the former name suggests, it was a monthly magazine for 144 years until 2001, when it published eleven issues; it published ten issues yearly from 2003 on, dropped "Monthly" from the cover starting with the January/February 2004 issue, and officially changed the name in 2007. The Atlantic features articles in the fields of the arts, the economy, foreign affairs, political science, and technology. Regular contributors include James Fallows and Jeffrey Goldberg.^[14]

In April 2005, The Atlantic‍‍ '‍s editors decided to cease publishing fiction in regular issues in favor of a newsstand-only annual fiction issue edited by longtime staffer C. Michael Curtis. They have since re-instituted the practice.[citation ^needed]

On January 22, 2008, TheAtlantic.com dropped its subscriber wall and allowed users to freely browse its site, including all past archives.^[15] In addition to TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic's web properties have expanded to include TheAtlanticWire.com, a news- and opinion-tracking site launched in 2009,^[16] and in 2011, TheAtlanticCities.com, a stand-alone website devoted to global cities and trends.^[17] According to a Mashable profile in December 2011, "traffic to the three web properties recently surpassed 11 million uniques per month, up a staggering 2500% since The Atlantic brought down its paywall in early 2008."^[18]

TheAtlantic.com covers politics, business, entertainment, technology, health, international affairs, and more. In December 2011, a new Health Channel launched on TheAtlantic.com, incorporating coverage of food, as well as topics related to the mind, body, sex, family, and public health.^[19] TheAtlantic.com has also expanded to visual storytelling with the addition of the In Focus photo blog, curated by Alan Taylor,^[20] and the Video Channel.^[21]

Literary history

A leading literary magazine, The Atlantic has published many significant works and authors. It was the first to publish pieces by the abolitionists Julia Ward Howe ("Battle Hymn of the Republic" on February 1, 1862), and William Parker's slave narrative, "The Freedman's Story" (in February and March 1866). It also published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education", a call for practical reform that led to his appointment to presidency of Harvard University in 1869; works by Charles Chesnutt before he collected them in The Conjure Woman (1899); and poetry and short stories, helping launch many national literary careers.[citation ^needed] For example, Emily Dickinson, after reading an article in The Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asked him to become her mentor.[citation ^needed] In 2005, the magazine won a National Magazine Award for fiction.[citation ^needed]

The magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of new technologies. The classic example isVannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" (July 1945), which inspired Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson to develop the modernworkstation and hypertext technology.[citation ^needed]^The magazine also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that was lost until 2001.[citation ^needed] Editors have recognized major cultural changes and movements; for example, the magazine published Martin Luther King, Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in August 1963.[citation ^needed]

In addition to its fiction and poetry, the magazine publishes writing on society and politics. "A three-part series by William Langewieschein 2002 on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center generated headlines, as have articles by James Fallows on planning for the Iraq war and reconstruction."^[23]

ber 1, 1857

As of 2012, its writers included Mark Bowden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows, Jeffrey Goldberg, Robert D. Kaplan, Megan McArdle, and Jeffrey Tayler.[citation ^needed]

Ownership

For all but recent decades, The Atlantic was known as a distinctively New England literary magazine (as opposed to Harper's and laterThe New Yorker, both from New York City). It achieved a national reputation and was important to the careers of many American writers and poets.[citation ^needed] By its third year, it was published by the famous Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields (later to become part of Houghton Mifflin[citation ^needed]⁾. The magazine was purchased in 1908 by its then editor, Ellery Sedgwick, but remained in Boston.

In 1980, the magazine was acquired by Mortimer Zuckerman, property magnate and founder of Boston Properties, who became its Chairman. On September 27, 1999, Zuckerman transferred ownership of the magazine to David G. Bradley, owner of the Beltway news-focused National Journal Group. Bradley had promised that the magazine would stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, as it did for the next five and a half years.

In April 2005, however, the publishers announced that the editorial offices would be moved from its long-time home at 77 North Washington Street in Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C.^[23] Later in August, Bradley told the New York Observer, cost cutting from the move would amount to a minor $200,000–$300,000 and those savings would be swallowed by severance-related spending. The reason was to create a hub in Washington where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate under the Atlantic Media Company umbrella. Few of the Boston staff agreed to relocate, and Bradley embarked on an open search for a new editorial staff.^[24]

In 2006, Bradley hired James Bennet as editor-in-chief, who had been the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. He also hired writers including Jeffrey Goldbergand Andrew Sullivan.^[25] Jay Lauf joined the organization as publisher and vice-president in 2008.^[26]

The Wire

The Wire (previously known as The Atlantic Wire) is a sister site of TheAtlantic.com that aggregates news and opinions from online, print, radio, and television outlets.^[27][28][29]When The Atlantic Wire first launched in 2009, it curated op-eds from across the media spectrum and summarized significant positions in each debate.^[29] Expanded to encompass news and original reporting, regular features include "What I Read", showcasing the media diets of individuals from the worlds of entertainment, journalism, and politics, and "Trimming the Times",^[30] a summary of the feature editor's choices of the best content in The New York Times. The Atlantic Wire rebranded itself as The Wire in November 2013.^[31][32]

CityLab

CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) is the latest expansion of The Atlantics digital properties, launched in September 2011. The stand-alone site has been described as exploring and explaining "the most innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today’s global cities and neighborhoods."^[33] Featuring the work of Richard Florida, urban theorist, professor, and Atlantic senior editor, TheAtlanticCities.com also has been described as showcasing leading voices in the urban planning and community building arenas.^[34] The Atlantic Cities was rebranded as CityLab on May 16, 2014.^[35] In June 2015, it hosted the U.S. launch of theUniverse Within, the final installment in the Highrise web documentary project.^[36]

Assessment

In June 2006, the Chicago Tribune named it one of the top ten English-language magazines, describing it as "a gracefully aging ... 150-year-old granddaddy of periodicals" because "it keeps us smart and in the know" with cover stories on the then-forthcoming fight over Roe v. Wade. It also lauded regular features such as "Word Fugitives" and "Primary Sources" as "cultural barometers."^[37]

On September 10, 2012, Salon criticized the current iteration of The Atlantic beginning with, "The magazine's features are always engaging but often seem to lack critical historical perspective", and the provocative, "Is the Atlantic making us stupid?"^[38]

List of editors

James Russell Lowell, 1857–61
James Thomas Fields, 1861–71
William Dean Howells, 1871–81
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1881–90
Horace Elisha Scudder, 1890–98
Walter Hines Page, 1898–99
Bliss Perry, 1899–1909
Ellery Sedgwick, 1909–38
Edward A. Weeks, 1938–66
Robert Manning, 1966–80
William Whitworth, 1980–99
Michael Kelly, 1999–2003
Cullen Murphy, 2003–2006 (interim editor, never named editor in chief)
James Bennet, 2006–present

List of issues

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 113. Contributor Carl Sandburg Collections (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library). Atlantic Monthly Company. 1914. Retrieved April 1, 2013.