pic.twitter.com/I8R2sXONuh https://t.co/LYM7FTnt94
— Jean-Michel Connard 좆됐어 (@torriangray) April 15, 2024
Per Maxi Tani at Semafor (which has its own problems, yes), “The Intercept is running out of cash”:
The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.
At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor, Pierre Omidyar, decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization. Now spun off from Omidyar’s First Look Media, The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March…
The Intercept’s CEO, Annie Chabel, told Semafor in an interview this week that those projections were a worst-case scenario, and that the Intercept had a “stretch revenue goal that would allow us to continue into a longer horizon.”
The Intercept was born a decade ago in a very different moment for media and politics. Two of its founders, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked surveillance files in 2013, which reshaped how Americans thought about the government and their privacy. Omidyar, a leftish billionaire with no known appetite for political combat, rapidly pledged deep support for an organization that would combine that anti-establishment mission with a combative form of online journalism born out of Gawker Media.
A decade later, American politics are almost unrecognizable. Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right. Liberal donors have lost their taste for party infighting as the specter of Donald Trump looms, while voices further left are promising to punish Joe Biden over his response to Gaza…
Many of the Intercept’s journalists direct their ire at Chabel, a longtime nonprofit executive.
Chabel joined the Intercept at a transition moment for the organization. In 2022, First Look Media had offered a $12 million grant to help the publication spin off — about half of what Intercept leaders had asked for. The publication’s editor-in-chief, Roger D. Hodge, said he told the organization’s board that he did not believe the grant was enough, and they should wind down the Intercept and give staff as generous a severance package as possible. Chabel, who had initially joined the organization as a consultant to manage expenses and oversee the spinoff, helped convince First Look Media to up its grant to $14 million, and presented what appeared to be a financial path forward for the organization…
During a meeting earlier this year, Scahill exploded at Chabel, saying she should resign. Other recent decisions by the organization’s leadership have irked remaining staff. As Semafor first reported, during an all staff meeting on Thursday the publication told employees that it had hired former Los Angeles Times assistant managing editor Ben Muessig to be the interim editor-in-chief — who, according to multiple sources familiar with the selection process, was not employees’ first choice.
And there is little internal consensus on how to move forward. Grim and Scahill are two of the outlet’s longest-serving figures, with Grim leading high-profile coverage and Scahill helming its podcast. But their plan would inevitably involve deep cuts and layoffs. (Other staffers pointed out to Semafor that, on the current trajectory, they’ll likely all lose their jobs anyway.)…
Myriad more details at the link, if you can deal with Semafor’s unspeakably ugly color scheme & layout. Perhaps this news will inspire some anti-Democratic right-wing sugar daddy like Peter Thiel to prop up Ryan Grim’s vanity project?
— Four Seasons Total Manscaping (@UncleScottiepoo) April 15, 2024
piratedan
I’m sure that they can burnish their cred with outside funding sources if they reach out to the Young Turks group and merge. That way it would be easier to keep score on the leftier than thou squad who want whatever they want with all of the grace of fascist undertones to make it happen.
HumboldtBlue
I don’t know who any of these people are or what The Intercept is, so I guess I’m the lucky one.
Jackie
@HumboldtBlue: We must be OLD!
frosty
@HumboldtBlue:
I guess it’s my lucky day too! Who are these people? Who cares?
Jackie
Reposted from earlier apparently dead thread:
Jack Smith strikes again!
Go Jack, go!
AxelFoley
I love this for them!
gwangung
I am less sanguine about The Intercept’s problems, because they reflect the general problems of online journalism, And we need a voice from the left (even the dirtbag left) as a counterweight to the Foxes who are going to keep their heads above water because of their cable money.
I find the infighting to be less than useful; if you’re facing extinction, you do yourself no favors by squabbling among themselves.
wjca
What’s the over/under on what TIFG’s favorite judge does with this?
NotMax
Chacun à son goût.
I find it easy on these old eyes and a snap to navigate.
SpaceUnit
Left wing my ass. The Intercept has always been a pied piper whose mission was to lead young dipshit libs into the political wilderness.
ETA: And I’ve long assumed it to be funded by Russian money.
Jackie
Why does the MSM even name Johnson as SOTH, when it’s OBVIOUS that TIFG is the SOTH???
Jackie
@wjca:
I’m not a gambler…
Melancholy Jaques
@gwangung:
Not so sure that the left (and most especially the dirtbag left) act as a counterweight to FOX. They seem to agree that Democrats are to blame for all the nation’s problems, if not the whole world’s, and that defeating them is the number one goal.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@HumboldtBlue: ryan grim pushed the ridiculous tara reade story.
Melancholy Jaques
@wjca:
She is going to tank the prosecution and there is nothing anyone can do to stop her. She does not care about her reputation, her future, or anything but saving Trump from a conviction.
sdhays
Has The Intercept ever been good? Greenwald’s deep involvement early on kept me away and I basically mistrust anything reported there.
wjca
A more plausible counterweight to Fox would be a center-right news source. Something to appeal to those who are not progressives, but not bat shit crazy either.
Chet Murthy
@wjca: A *credible* center-right new source that didn’t accept stories from the Fox Puke Funnel.
Martin
@gwangung: Agreed completely. Not a huge fan of the Intercept, but at the rate we’re going we’re going to be left with Fox Business, Last Week Tonight, and SNL Weekend Update.
wjca
Of course. A news source, not a fantasy source.
Poe Larity
Perhaps Glenn can pair up with Michelle Malkin and restart Pajamas Media and be relevant in some alter Star Trek Kelvin timeline.
Princess
I’d really like a news source that was equally critical of everybody, that sharply interviewed all its targets, with follow-up questions, and that saw its mission as serving the public and telling the truth. I loathe the rah rah for our team MSNBC as much as I loathe Fox. I think both serve to increase tribalism more than they make informed citizens and are bad for the country. The news is not right or left or centre right. The news is the news. Or at least it was. The big problem is we used to have a news industry, a publishing industry, and an entertainment industry and now all we have is an entertainment industry.
HumboldtBlue
@strange visitor (from another planet):
Ahh, serious investigative journalist, I see.
Sure Lurkalot
Calm down, we still have The Free Press, courtesy of Bari Weiss and her band of merry grifters.
karen marie
@gwangung: That’s bullshit. The Intercept is a garbage fire in a class of its own and of its own making.
Aussie Sheila
@SpaceUnit:
Not every irritating lefty is a Russian asset. Christ on a cracker! No wonder US liberals struggle with trump. Get a grip. Ideological fervour without facts is crazytown. Partisanship without an open mind is the same.
Brachiator
@gwangung:
I totally agree. Unfortunately, most posters here will focus on their understandable hatred for Greenwald than on the larger issue.
The media source you hate is failing. So is the media source you love. It is doubly ironic that so many people cling to good info by journalists on Twitter, a social media source that depends on the erratic decisions of a fascist racist asswipe.
@Princess:
Yep. You nailed it.
SpaceUnit
@Aussie Sheila:
They’re not lefties. Take a hike and take your boy Rupert with you.
Aussie sheila
@SpaceUnit:
I’m being charitable here, so here goes. Murdoch was a natural born Australian citizen. It was the US that gave him US citizenship. He was embraced in your polity and has made a pile of money in your country. In my country his publications lose money and he is reviled, except by the batshit Right. He no longer has the power to sway the centre.
Perhaps you might reflect on that.
opiejeanne
@SpaceUnit: Thank you.
SpaceUnit
@Aussie sheila:
Honestly, I reflect on it more than I wish was necessary.
And I apologize for the hostile tone. I’ve just never felt that The Intercept was operating in good faith.
ETA: It seemed like a Kremlin mouthpiece even before trump.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila:
No, you’re right about that. But we’ve seen a distressing tendency by a lot of them to attack in only one direction, even when there are plenty of targets in other directions. Julian Assange is an example; so is Greenwald. Another is Taibbi. Some of us have good reason to believe that even if the Intercept isn’t bought-and-paid-for by GRU, it’s certainly a fellow traveler organization.
We live here, and we watch the slanted “reporting” from the Intercept. It’s pretty obvious.
P.S. And then there are lefties who literally write for Russian outlets — like Chris Hedges.
Brachiator
@Aussie sheila:
Murdoch obviously made a lot of money in Australia before he expanded his holdings. Many of his newspapers in the US and UK lose money, but still dominate in their regions.
GB News is another right wing outlet that is willing to lose money in order to spread right wing propaganda.
Does Murdoch still own Sky News Australia? I don’t know how popular this news service is, but it produces some of the most inaccurate and vile right wing bullshit imaginable.
SpaceUnit
@Chet Murthy:
Yeah. At some point you just can’t not see the pattern and what seems to connect all the dots.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila:
It’s also worth pointing out that there have been a number of large Russian influence networks exposed in recent weeks — in Europe, but I’m betting they’re here in the US and Canada too (probably Australia too). Used-to-be, we could give the benefit of the doubt to these leftist nutters, b/c they were at worst just harmless. Now, not so much. Not. So. Much.
Chet Murthy
@SpaceUnit: @Aussie Sheila: Mark Galeotti discussed RU’s methods in recruiting and running agents and such on his podcast today: https://inmoscowsshadows.buzzsprout.com/1026985/14884418-in-moscow-s-shadows-143-of-mice-and-man
He points out that there are lots of things the GRU can do, short of literally recruiting an agent (or (heh) honey trapping them). There are conferences, speaking invitations, junkets, etc. All sorts of things they can do.
Aussie sheila
@Chet Murthy:
Sure I get that. But what kind of grounded, organic left would ever mistake GG as a lefty? Even in the early aughts when I started reading us blogs I had him pinned as a slightly unhinged libertarian. As for the Intercept it’s ‘style’ is familiar to me. I read widely and I’m familiar with the type of analysis they push. I don’t care.
Most people don’t care either. The question really is whether the US ‘grounded’ left can mount an effective electoral opposition to trumpism, together with an expansion of people’s confidence in their own power to change things there.
That will require more than the necessary, but not sufficient effort to ensure as many people as possible can and will vote ‘blue’ in November. The effort to organise the multi racial US working class is equally as important. In the long term.
In the short term the petite bourgeois reaction that Trump represents needs to be electorally crushed.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie sheila: It’s worth remembering that Ralph Nader almost certainly cost us the 2000 election. Worth remembering that today — *today* — TFG’s minions are explicitly supporting third-party lefty independent candidates to try to scrape a few votes away from Biden, in hopes of winning thereby. Is RFKJr a lefty? Is he a Russian agent of influence ? Does it matter ? I don’t think it does. I think that his motives and those of GRU are aligned, and hence GRU will do what it can to support him, without, *without coordination*.
Re: GG, I’ll just note that *lots* of people (including me, including people who read this blog, including lots of people at LG&M) thought GG was a somewhat cranky but still good guy. We were wrong. Lots more thought Assange was a good guy. We. Were. Wrong.
SpaceUnit
@Chet Murthy:
Adam advised us long ago that the GRU’s strategy against western society was penetration at all levels.
Chet Murthy
@Chet Murthy: Hell, lots of us thought Snowden was a *fucking hero*. I mean, how stupid could we be? He ends up in Moscow, and the penny doesn’t drop that he was a fucking Russian agent? Idiots, all of us. Idiots.
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
Re Assange, I agree, but with this caveat. He is a misogynist, typical tech bro. A type that I am sure many people here have been familiar with. I can’t stand him or his type. But let me give you the feeling here. No one gives a shit about whether what he did overshot US journalism limits on ‘encouraging’ or ‘assisting’ leaking US intelligence. The popular feeling here is if he is incarcerated in the US he will die there. No Australian politician who wants to be re-elected will countenance that because the electorate won’t. He’s no hero here, but he’s a familiar type and people don’t like bullies.
As for GG and Russian influence on certain ‘lefty’ publications and on twitter. I get it. But the US left needs to get out more. You know where Russian influence is really important?
In Europe. In Austria, Germany and in the UK.
Instead of working up jihads against suspected Russian influencers on minuscule ‘left ‘ publications in the US how about working to ensure that an organised US multi racial working class is immune to the craptacular nonesense constantly spewed by international fascists and their useful idiots?
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila:
And last: we *can* walk and chew gum at the same time. Nobody here is under any illusions. But we’re not going to excuse our domestic moral imbeciles, just because they’re lefties. And something else: lots of us have noticed that one of the things all these leftier-than-thous have in common, is that they’re not actually believers in democracy. The stench of “when we’re in charge, things’ll be different” is impossible to miss, in their rhetoric. They’re authoritarians, and lots of us aren’t going to stand for that shit, even if they’re also “leftists”.
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
Whew a lot there. You forget I think, that the US definition of espionage isn’t necessarily the rest of the world’s definition. I repeat, he’s an intelligent political dope who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he is. As to my country’s definition of espionage, it would be up to a Court. In this country, not yours.
Oh, and don’t patronise me about the connection between Putin and international fascism. I get it. Truly.
But he is immensely assisted by the US Republican Party. Unlike here where local Conservatives in elected positions wouldn’t dare do what US elected Republicans say and do.
And as for the trope that ‘US slavery and racism’ is an original sin of your polity’?
Drop it.
Every polity has a history that is bad.
God knows we have here.
But translating the history of human political struggle for emancipation against oppression, as nothing more than a struggle against ‘original sin’ is beyond idiotic for anyone who counts themselves as part of the ‘left’ as opposed to a constantly outraged moral minority.
People make their own history, but not under their own conditions.
Remember?
Aussie Sheila
@Aussie Sheila:
Oh and before I forget. The idea that a bunch of loudmouths on twitter represents the ‘Left’ can only be countenanced by someone who has never done any organising irl whatsoever.
bjacques
@Chet Murthy: it’s not only Australians who buy into Assange being only a publisher Who Must Be Squashed By AmeriKKKa. Nobody seems to care that the Obama DOJ never seemed interested in pursuing him, not for the cables or even for dumping Podesta’s emails and arguably changing American history *while Obama was still President*. He even said later that he didn’t think it worth the trouble.
It was ironic that Trump’s DOJ filed charges, and on a sound legal basis. Assange’s usefulness had ended, and anyone who could undermine his opponent could have undermined him as well (unlikely even absent GRU aims—bros before hos, amirite?).
For all that, I’d like Biden’s DOJ to cut Assange loose, and let him spend the rest of his miserable life looking over his shoulder thinking it’s all a trick to get him later. It would expose his antics as a bigger danger to liberal democracies than to dictatorships, because if he had fucked around with them, he would have found out very quickly.
EDIT: Statute of limitations may allow it. For espionage it may be ten years, but I don’t know if that’s a hard rule. Any lawyers want to comment on that?
Baud
@Princess:
News being news would make it liberal, and therefore partisan.
Aussie Sheila
@bjacques:
If you think a dope like Assange is a bigger danger to liberal democracy than the US National Security Apparatus under Trump then you are as big a dope as Assange. And if he is released into Australia there is no reason he would be looking over his shoulder. Unless you think the US would send agents over here to kill him?
Let me tell you. If they did, the Aircraft carrier that is Australia would be distinctly less useful than before.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie Sheila:
he worked hand-in-hand with Russian intelligence in 2016. He needs to go to prison, as a reminder to anybody else who tries it, that they *also* will go to prison.
SpaceUnit
Everyone have a good night. It’s very late here. Going to bed.
Baud
Via Reddit
Aussie Sheila
@Chet Murthy:
Really? Get a grip. Working hand in hand with Russian intelligence is very bad and shows an execrable moral compass. But worthy of jail time?
Hmmm. Let’s see now……….
eclare
@Baud:
Very good!
bjacques
Assange is accused of conspiring with Manning to get that collateral murder footage. If he had not, he wouldn’t be facing charges, as he isn’t for publishing criminally hacked emails or diplomatic cables.
Assange freed would be looking over his shoulder because that’s the kind of guy he is. He fancied himself as the fearless crusader who makes corrupt governments tremble. But they don’t tremble, outside political thrillers. They go after you using the law or hitmen. The US, for all its faults, isn’t as corrupt as in Assange’s imagination. Its laws protect journalists but not spies. Assange was a journalist until he became a spy (allegedly). His fans hate Obama because DRONES!1! yet his DOJ had plenty of time to prosecute but didn’t. Trump, on the other hand, wants to turn the US government into one the likes of Assange would be wise not to fuck with. But even under his first (let it be only) term, his DOJ charged Assange with conspiracy to commit espionage wrt Collateral Murder, not working hand in glove with the GRU wrt Hillary’s emailz.
I mean that someone like Assange is a bigger threat to liberal democracies because their laws protect journalists, and it’s a risk liberal democracies accept as a cost of remaining so. Illiberal democracies would throw his ass in prison for any reason or none, and dictatorships would just kill him. So, yeah, Assange is a risk to liberal democracy relative to other governments, to which he is no risk at all.
Aussie Sheila
@bjacques:
Stupid, narcissist arseholes are a risk to everyone and everything. That doesn’t mean we have to run our lives and our politics as if they are in control of everything and everyone. Assange is not worth the risk his continued pursuit and persecution poses to values that here at least, are still held.
bjacques
I agree that Assange isn’t worth the trouble of pursuing. Compared to Fox and similar actors that really are bent on turning our democracy into an illiberal one, he’s small potatoes. That’s why I hope the DOJ finds some reason—statute of limitations or whatever—to drop the case. I can understand them refusing to comment on Assange’s worries about being extradited to the US if he went to Sweden to face rape charges, but it would have saved everyone a lot of grief if they had.
geg6
@gwangung:
Then subscribe to TPM.
Baud
@geg6:
👍
Only media outlet that recognizes liberals as news consumers. (MSNBC is more about opinion these days).
Subsole
@gwangung: The dortbag left ain’t left, though. They’re Ron Paul Libertarians with cheap Marxist aesthetics.
Baud
@Subsole:
Isn’t “dirtbag left” their own name for their cohort?
ETA: I do like “dortbag” though.
lowtechcyclist
Someday I’d like to see Booz Allen Hamilton get a fraction as much attention as Snowden gets, for having sufficiently lax security that Snowden was able to scoop up all the files he did. AFAIK they’re still an NSA contractor in good standing.
ETA: Hell, I really don’t get why the NSA even has outside contractors. If there’s an org that should handle everything in-house, the NSA is it.
ETA2: I worked for the Census Bureau for 25 years. We had outside contractors, but at least on my side of the house (demographics) the flow of information went in one direction – from them to us. We got address lists and stuff from them; they didn’t get access to any of the info we collected from respondents. I hate to think that NSA contractors had more access to NSA info than Census contractors did to Census info. Should be zero in both cases.
Subsole
@Melancholy Jaques:
Chapo Faphouse are a bunch of smelly fucking neckbeards who embraced Bernie because he promised to make their wildest Libertarian dreams come true. They could do what they liked and never, ever have to pay for it.
And that filthy, shrill, evil, bitch/whore/shill took that away from them.
We go on about Horseshoe Theory, but honestly? The more I look at Bernie’s camp-followers, the more I have to conclude that there is no migration.
These folks were always a bunch of Oppositional-Defiant asswipes, just waiting to embrace their inner MAGA hat.
Would certainly explain why the horseshoe only seems to work Left-to-Right…
Subsole
@wjca:
Never happen, homie. No money in that shit.
Aussie Sheila
@Subsole: Bingo ! Thank you. You said succinctly what I was groping to say.
@Baud : The fact they call themselves that is illustrative that they aren’t grounded in anything other than their own narcissism.
The US Left irl as I know it is far tougher, more grounded and less visible than the morally outraged grifters posing on social media.
Where I live, the electoral laws and industrial rules are more conducive to a healthier and broader left than can exist in a FPTP electoral system married to an insanely decentralised polity where States have more rights than womens’ right to life.
Baud
@Aussie Sheila:
Sure. The Libs of TikTok aren’t libs. But liberals don’t watch Libs of TikTok for insight into liberalism. I don’t know who the Dirtbag Left’s audience is.
David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 Koch
Seriously, I havent heard of them in years. They completely fell of the map, like RT News. Without Hillary to hate, they withered up and blew away.
Kay
I knew Glenn Greenwald wasn’t on the Left – he’s not even a “libertarian”, he’s an authoritarian wanna- be prosecutor and Matt Taibbi’s ludicrous made-up numbers during his “reporting” on the financial crash revealed him as a fraud. Matt Taibbi went on to again make up ludicrous numbers when reporting on the Twitter files, which is amusing. Apparently he only has one trick. His fellow media members are all innumerate so he can pull this shit forever, apparently.
I’m not sad to see The Intercept go. Why doesn’t their wealthy backer fund a real news site without celebrity journalists? Just hire normal journalists from all the local newspapers that are folding. They’ll get less flouncing off and fewer huge ego battles too.
cain
@HumboldtBlue: all you need to know was that was where Glenn Greenwald launched all his attacks from.
TBone
Some good news about the RWNJ industrial “news” complex:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/conservative-digital-media-traffic/678055/
Kay
Twitter is really, really bad for journalism. It was a bad idea for journalists to all go out and create their own “brands” on social media. It’s completely discredited them.
Ryan Grim pushed the Tara Reade story – clownish behavior- but the NYTimes political team pushed the Hunter Biden corruption story, which is also clownish. The social media branding, television appearances and the silly books have just ruined these people. They can no longer do the basic job.
There’s lots of non celebrity competent journalists being laid off all over the country. One could hire ten of those for price of one of these prima donnas and it would be a much better value for readers.
cain
@gwangung:
The thing is the dirt bag left does the same thing .. attack the democratic party. They don’t attack Trump. Everything coming out of them is to attack Biden from the left. It isn’t a counterpart for Fox it’s more of a alliance of the stupid.
Baud
@cain:
Too many liberals confuse “we need to be exposed to different viewpoints” with “we can’t disparage other people for low quality work.”
Kay
@TBone:
They watch fringier stuff now though. I don’t even know what it is – YouTube and Rumble talk shows with loud heavy metal music intros. They have a whole set of shows we don’t even know about.
Subsole
@Baud: It is, and so do I.
Man, I wish that had been intentional.
Kay
Here’s The Intercept’s whistle blower hero:
She was a (fake) expert witness in criminal cases! People went to prison based on Reade’s invented resume and her testimony as an “expert”. I mean, Christ. Shouldn’t they apologize for promoting this person?
There’s no accountability at all in the news industry. It just doesn’t matter how many times they are wrong. Their careers just continue, forever.
Joey Maloney
@AxelFoley: The bitterer, the betterer!
Kay
@Baud:
Where I differ from a lot of people on BJ is I think this works both ways ideologically. Liberals get snookered into supporting fake Lefties – 100% true – but centrist Democrats get snookered into supporting Righties, too. Andrew Sullivan is on the Right. He’s also a fucking moron and a misogynist. Lots and lots of centrist liberals read him and supported him.
IMO it comes from the same place – liberals want Lefties to like and approve of them and centrists want Righties to like and approve of them. I don’t even think it’s ideological. It’s social. A need to be accepted.
Baud
@Kay:
I agree. I think both ends of the coalition feel like they should have higher status within the coalition, and that leave them psychologically susceptible to being manipulated.
ETA: See all the old white guys that are upset at Dems for being “woke” for an example from the right side.
cain
@Baud:
Luckily in this blog we do. Although at times I think we have swooned over Matt Taibi like others during the Bush years. Probably cringe going back and looking at who we loved during the Bush years.
Baud
@cain:
Some people swooned over Greenwald too. Proud to say I’m not a swooner.
cain
@Kay:
The Bush years was a time when we lefties were looking for sane voices that were actual conservatives applying conservative values. The GOP was going through a fervor to build their own empire. Where they ended up today is a weird ass place.
Kay
@Baud:
That’s good. There’s truth to that. I think the Party is actually better balanced now that it used to be. The views of centrists were over represented for most of my time in the Democratic Party and liberals were shut out. That wasn’t good either.
I think it’s about right now and reflects the actual makeup – 50% centrists, 25% (very) liberal and 25% lean Right.
cain
@Baud: me neither.. we really over do it.
Geminid
This morning’s Politico Playbook playbook tells me that President Biden will hold bilateral meetings today with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shi Al-Sudani at noon, and with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fialla at 3 pm. Al-Sudani and Biden certainly have a lot to talk about, one item being the status of the small U.S. military mission in western Iraq. I expect both foreign leaders and their parties are meeting with other administration officials as well..
Vice President Kamala Harris is working out of LA today (trigger warning: “Bipartisan”):
Harris will return to LA afterwards.
Kay
@cain:
There was quite a bit of swooning over Assange, which I also didn’t take part in.
cain
@Kay:
I think you can thank Bernie and others for pushing the party left. Much as I love Obama I know he was a centrist. Biden is the surprise lefty.
Baud
@Kay:
I would label it differently, but the percentages sound about right
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: If you are Very Online in super-progressive spaces, you tend to see more of the horseshoe pseudo-Leftists, your Greenwald and Taibbi types and their fans, so they drive us insane. But in real life and in more mainstream-media situations, it’s much more likely for liberals to pay attention to right-wingers posing as sensible centrist types. That’s where you get Democrats paying attention to the Andrew Sullivans and Conor Friedersdorfs and even David Brookses. And they probably actually have more pull.
Liberals really want to think of themselves as reasonable people who pay attention to the sanest voices on the other side, and there’s a whole niche of conservatives who intentionally play on that with “liberals are doing liberalism wrong” think-pieces to drive wedges into the left coalition.
Baud
@cain:
I don’t agree with that. Dems have been moving left at a steady pace since 2002. We didn’t make some big jump in 2015/2016 when he came on the national stage.
ETA: I see you mentioned “others.” I suppose that makes it technically more accurate.
Kay
@cain:
The embrace of Andrew Sullivan by centrist Democrats was tough for me because Andrew Sullivan doesn’t support civil rights for women. He’s also, IMO, personally a misogynist – he doesn’t like women.
I felt thrown under the bus. By centrists. Like they were chasing after Andrew Sullivan’s approval (WTF) and that was more important than my civil rights.
Chief Oshkosh
@gwangung:
I prefer Rawstory for that.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree with you about mainstream media. Less agreement about “real life.”
cain
@Baud: Fair. Let me modify my comment to say that Americans moving left thanks to the collapse of Reaganomics (fuck you Reagan) gave Bernie and others a voice. I don’t know if they accelerated but for me my journey from centralist to liberal was because of the Iraq War.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: You resisted Avenatti?
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I enjoyed his quips, but I don’t swoon over anyone (except myself).
ETA: I’m not big on saviors.
Matt McIrvin
@cain: The reason Israel/Gaza is such a destructive wedge issue for US politics is that for the first time in a while, it feels like Democrats are behaving exactly the way leftists complain they always do, at least initially taking a traditional “mainstream” position that is too far to the right.
That really hasn’t been Biden’s MO up to now–as President, he’s tended to govern way to the left of the 1990s-style centrist Democrats that people tended to think he was one of before his time as VP. And the people who insist to this day that the Democrats keep moving to the right really had to strain to find examples. But with Israel he seemed to start with the old playbook.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Agree 100%. It also depends on where you live. I laugh when I heard centrists moaning about liberal public schools. My public school district is Right wing. Always has been. I’m not alone in that either -every public school district in a Right wing area is Right wing.
But if you live in California or New York you think the Lefties are taking over the Party. I talk to Right leaning Democrats every day where I live. Probably 1/3 of our local Democratic group are anti abortion Catholics who are only in the Democratic Party because they’re union members and they want to make 26 an hour instead of 12. Which I’m fine with! Big tent, baby. We need everyone.
cain
@Kay:
This blog certainly was one of them. We front paged his crap all the time. I think we were hoping for a John Cole like transformation.
Watching him go down in flames was lovely.
TBone
@Kay: Russell Brand? 😆
I’m joking trying to lighten things up. It’s still good news – even if according to the article I posted it’s Facebook’s fault.
JML
@Kay: It’s one thing to read someone like Sullivan (or Charlie Sykes) to try and keep an eye on what’s going on outside of your world, and sharpen your own arguments by hearing counter-opinions, and another thing to fool yourself into thinking they’re on your side.
I do think people have a tendency when things are going sideways on the right to look for someone that seems like they could be someone you could work with and hope they gain support within their own sphere. Treated as a loyal opposition, it’s fine…but supporting a Sullivan or a Sykes? Be careful, because they’re a temporary ally at best.
Geminid
@Kay: I’m curious: how’s it looking for Sherrod Brown?
I’m seeing Bernie Moreno ads now on social media; he doesn’t seem like a very compelling candidate, but I’m biased and 400 miles away.
Baud
@JML:
Jen Rubin is what people wanted Andrew Sullivan to be.
cain
@zhena gogolia: I think someone even said how handsome he was. 🤮🤢🤢🤢
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Sullivan is super racist too, always has been. To a shocking degree.
Kay
@cain:
This blog has …evolved some on womens rights. Looking back is a little cringey for me. But maybe the whole world evolved a little on that among other things. Progress! :)
Subsole
@cain:
I think a lot of us were basically processing a multisided gaslight/browbeating dogpile combo on top of a searing national tragedy.
Most of us were just grateful for someone, anyone who said “Yeah. You’re not crazy. I see it too. These people are blood-drunk money-wringing double-talking hypocritical sleazebags. This shit they are doing is wrong. It is a b a d i d e a. It will end in tears.”
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Maybe I just spend an inordinate amount of time around middle-aged people with some money.
cain
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s understandable. The left doesn’t really have that clear idea of how to handle Israel and we still dont. We do know that Gaza is wrong but since everyone is an asshole there..
It’s a great wedge issue for antisemitic assholes though.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Agree. I was obsessed with reading his blog when he was conducting his INSANE investigation into Sarah Palin’s belly.
Thousands of supposed “liberals” were reading that misogynist ranting and cheering him on. It was like a car crash I couldn’t look away from.
I just felt this physical revulsion, because that’s an old, old thing, men thinking they own womens pregnant bodies. It’s absolutely central to anti choice ideology – the women disappears and becomes “a pregnancy” and men own the pregnancy.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Tempted to nominate.
Subsole
@Kay: Also, too: I always caught a more-than-faint whiff of racism wafting off the ol’ boy, myself.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: Politics is about coalitions and often they’re between people who don’t agree about a lot. For the first couple of years after 9/11 there was a lot of “liberal hawk” activity in which Democrats allied with neocons, which went very badly. Then the anti-Bush coalition later on swung as far away from that as possible, and as a consequence had a bunch of paleocons and pseudo-leftists who turned out to be stooges for Putin or outright fascists. There’s a cycle of overcorrection.
cain
@Kay: I think the last 10 years have exposed a lot of things about this country that activists/black people/natives have been trying to tell us for years.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I remember twenty years ago, Sullivan was a voice to be reckoned with, but I’m not sure that was true among Dems even fifteen years ago. By the time Obama was in the White House, my impression was he was irrelevant.
Now people such as David Brooks, sure. People will accept someone like him as a legitimate voice because his perch on the FTFNYT’s op-ed page validates him.
cain
@Subsole: 💯
We needed others on the other side to validate what we were feeling
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
True. It makes it hard to get our bearings and build momentum for our values.
Subsole
@Baud: Apt.
Kay
@Geminid:
I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch with them for a month or more. His campaign person for my county will be in touch soon I bet – they usually get serious with on the ground organizing in May or June.
Sherrod runs really good, really aggressive campaigns. Don’t let his rumpled mild manner fool you – he intends to win.
I was contacted by Pride parade organizers. They have permits to do a parade on our courthouse square (a first for us) and asked the local Dems to turn out. I’ll invite Sherrod and Marcy Kaptur to that and not tell anyone so no one gets mad if they can’t show up – this county is not exactly a huge vote sink for them – they should probably spend their time elsewhere.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
Well, to a certain extent it’s about validation of ones beliefs, right? It’s more valuable coming from a Republican or a Lefty (respectively) because they’re outsiders to the Democratic Party. It’s like “I’m SO correct even Republicans agree with me!”
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, totally. One of the many, many, many things I doubt I will ever forgive That Man for was making the idea of projecting force abroad in defense of the national interest a hollow, poisonous concept.
Basically, he made foreign deployments so toxic that when we actually could have benefitted from a more muscular foreign policy (Crimea 2014??), we were gunshy.
Kind of like letting Rwanda sink into genocide because we didn’t want another Somalia.
Kay
@Geminid:
I responded but it disappeared. Maybe it will show up.
Baud
@Subsole:
Good examples.
Geminid
@cain: I think the Iraq war shifted a significant number of people. It cost the Republicans voters on the moderate side, and made its conservative side more Isolationist.
The war’s follow-on effects in this country were mainly political. The effects in the region were more profound, and people and nations there are living with them today. Much of today’s meeting between President Biden and Iraqi PM Al-Sudani will concern efforts to stabilize the region that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld destabilized 21 years ago.
TBone
At this time, I’d like to thank Jared Kushner for his successful effort to bring about peace in the Middle East. Statesman extraordinaire. Philanthropist! Credit where credit is due.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/jared-kushner-peace-institute
Omnes Omnibus
I’ll admit that Greenwald seemed like a great voice on our side in the first part of the Bush II era, but it quickly became obvious that he was a simply a polemicist with a strong right libertarian bias and an axe to grind about any use of US power. His dishonesty came to light later, at least for me. Sullivan? He promoted The Bell Curve and was a Thatcherite. I never bought what he was selling.
zhena gogolia
@cain: He had a kind of swaggering charm, but his eyes were too close together.
Geminid
@Baud: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was another example of the US being too tied down in a pointless war to effectively oppose Russian aggression. It wasn’t just a matter of material resources; Americans’ willingness to commit forces overseas is like a bank account, and by 2008 the Bush government was overdrawn.
Chris
@Chet Murthy:
Oh, I’ve been fairly proud for a long time of the fact that I smelled something funny on Snowden and Assange right off the bat and said so. Let’s say that I didn’t take it for granted that they were bad guys*, but there was something weird about them and the entire direction that their followers were taking. And yes, it was tied in to the fact that from very early on, their fixation wasn’t just anti-security-state or even anti-U.S. generically, but specifically anti-liberal, anti-Democrat, anti-Obama. To the extent that there was anything excusable there, it was “well, we need to hold accountable the people running the security state, regardless of which party is in the White House right now!” – but that reasoning completely fell apart when Trump came to power, and instead of continuing to oppose Whoever’s In The White House, they remained just as dementedly fixated on the Deep State Corporate Two-Party Duopoly, which is to say, anyone who didn’t like Trump. Orange Man Bad, don’t you know?
* As opposed to my dad, who had them pegged as agents of a hostile foreign power right off the bat. Dad is a career federal employee, of course, which comes with its own sets of biases. But guess what? He was right.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: The Snowden wars here were fun. As was the fight over DRONEZ!!!!!
TS
@Brachiator:
Without some of your adjectives, this came up in the Oz press in relation to the attacks at the Bondi (Sydney) shopping center.
X decided the attacker was a young uni student who lived in Sydney.
For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student xxx xxx was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people.
The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned Mr xxx into an internet villain.
Shortly after the attacker was killed
many accounts on X (formerly known as Twitter) post blurry photos of the offender online, falsely claiming he is of Middle Eastern heritage and accusing him of being an Islamic jihadist.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-15/how-misinformation-spread-after-bondi-junction-stabbing/103708210
Also from the ABC (Australia’s national broadcaster – government funded)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-15/screenshot-alt-right-exploits-bondi-junction-attack-with-disinfo/103709852
How the alt right used X to exploit the Bondi attacks
It’s true that nature abhors a vacuum, but nature’s got nothing on X (formerly Twitter) in a crisis.
I wouldn’t be the first or last person to complain about how X is run. … Since entering its (selective) free speech era under Elon Musk, banned accounts have been reinstated and content moderation has been gutted. …
Part of the problem might be that we’re confusing X with Twitter: a platform that no longer exists.
Chris
@Aussie Sheila:
This, on the other hand, is definitely true.
The attention paid to “the left” in the sense of people on Twitter with Hamas or Putin avatars is out of all proportion to its actual numbers, and the fact that it constantly gets branded, specifically, “the left” even by left-of-center people doesn’t help anybody, especially when those people are blatantly Trump supporters. Nobody on the other side of the aisle is looking at the tiny numbers of Republicans NeverTrumpers and calling them “the right.”
matt
@Aussie Sheila: No offense, but you don’t seem to know jack shit about US politics.
Marmot
@Kay: I’m late to this thread, but can’t pass this by:
I will never forget the Dem tolerance of this buffoon. I think 80% of it resulted from Sullivan’s habit of obscuring and generalizing his own opinions by using “one” in place of “I.”
On top of that, one wonders how a person can get snowed so easily when strawman arguments are phrased in passive voice.
I mean, seriously, that writing style smacks of dress-up sophistication and his viewpoints are always reactionary-friendly.
Chris
@Kay:
Yeah. It’s also hard to find anybody on the “far left” who’s been as comprehensive and massive a thorn in the party’s side as Lieberman or Manchin. Sinema is if anything even more telling; she might have started out Green and run a relatively left-friendly campaign, but as soon as she was in office she made a beeline for Joe Manchin Centrism and never looked back.
Honestly, it’s the reason I hate the horseshoe theory. It posits a unique affiliation between “the far left” (whatever the hell that is in any given place, which varies wildly) and the far right, and that’s simply bullshit. It wasn’t true in the 1920s and 1930s, and it isn’t true today. And it lets everybody in between them off the hook, even the so-called “center right” (which is, of course, why it’s a theory so beloved of mainstream political commenters), despite their own massive contributions to the rise of fascism.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: I think the commonality between some on the far left and far right that gives rise to the horseshoe theory is a tendency toward authoritarianism and disdain for democracy. But that just my theory.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: I did. I don’t fawn. Period. Well may be I did fawn a little bit over Obama.
schrodingers_cat
I see that Aussie Sheila is here to give us lessons about how our politics works. I wish people from other countries would find a better hobby than American politics. Or atleast bother to find out more factual information about how US politics works before giving us lectures.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I think what drives it is the urge to find easy answers to really difficult problems and the unease with uncertainty and not knowing.
Chris
@Kay:
Quite possibly the worst thing Andrew Sullivan has ever done is make me defend and sympathize with Sarah Palin.
The Pale Scot
So establishment of a dominating white society in AUS. has been a great benefit to the Aborigines? No remedial or admission of guilt is necessary?
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Yeah, I think I’d place the extreme point of rightward movement around 2004, the Kerry campaign. He wasn’t bad but he couldn’t distinguish himself from Bush so strongly on the most important issue of the time–instead, somehow the whole campaign became about Vietnam! It was amazing that he did as well as he did.
After that, everything started to fall apart for Bush and it was easier to make sharp distinctions. The biggest selling point for Obama in the ’08 primary was that he had been against the Iraq invasion.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
That would be fine if there was some unique affinity, or some unique tendency to collaborate, between far left and far right when it comes to contempt for democracy. There isn’t. Both then and now, the fascists got the biggest chunk of their support from supposedly respectable “center” right folks who likewise shared their contempt for democracy. (And even outside of the center right, it isn’t exactly difficult to find people who either agree with their democracy-hating or whose reaction to it is to tell other people to stop overreacting).
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
The tragedy of the Kerry campaign is that if the election had been held just one year later, he would’ve swept it, even without Katrina. Alas, the pro-war consensus broke down just slowly enough to give Dubya another term.
Marmot
@Kay:
Yep. And Sullivan put wacko Betsy McCaughey in The New Republic, with all her immortal lies about healthcare reform. Death Panels!
matt
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The day after Bush won reelection, a friend of mine posted that “America has terminal cancer.” I vehemently disagreed with him at the time, but now I wonder if he was right.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I think the distinction is that the centrists are more likely to try to pull the Democratic Party consensus in their direction, whereas the sort of accelerationist “horseshoe” coalition focuses laser-like on why you should not vote for Democrats and should work to defeat them in elections.
schrodingers_cat
I am a partisan Democrat and give a side eye to anyone of any political persuasion that seeks to undermine Democrats I don’t care if they call themselves left, right or center. I never fell for Taibbi, Assange or Brooks or Sullivan.
While they are far from perfect, Democrats are the only thing standing between the us and complete mayhem that the Rs will unleash if they get back in power.
Matt McIrvin
(Also, the centrists’ ideal candidate is some chimerical version of Mitt Romney and the horseshoe-ists’ is Donald Trump, who they see as some kind of walking bomb to blow up the system.)
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Same.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: The Communist prof who spoke to our DTC seemed to be pining for T’s second term.
Marmot
@schrodingers_cat: Oh those old goofballs! “Enhance the differences”? I forget the phrase.
Do you remember who the prof was? And what’s DTC?
schrodingers_cat
@Marmot: Of course I remember. I was one of the organizers as I am in the exec council (don’t ask). DTC (Democratic Town Committee).
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think that’s true, or at least it’s only true if you’re comparing apples and oranges. There are absolutely centrists that are obsessed with not voting for Democrats and defeating them in elections – the entire No Labels scam, which was chaired by Joe Lieberman and really wanted to run Joe Manchin, is this in a nutshell. And there are absolutely leftists who are focused on pulling the Democrats in their direction, sometimes in ways that are really harmful, but still are part of the party and vote with is most of the time – that’s the guys who are currently refusing to sign the Ukraine discharge petition because it includes aid to Israel.
It’s just that for whatever reason, “centrists” is always assumed to mean the semi-reasonable people voting with the party even if extracting their pound of flesh from it, and “leftists” is always assumed to mean the howler monkey on Twitter telling you not to vote Democrat.
Chris
@schrodingers_cat:
Agreed. It’s also just that, more generally, the Democratic Party is the crucible through which every worthwhile political cause of the last ninety years has had to pass in order to go from “a good idea that a lot of people are agitating for” to “an actual policy that’s been enacted and is now being enforced by the government.”
There’s effectively no other game in town for people who want to get things done in politics, and hasn’t been in ages. (Even civil rights, the Democrats’ original bête noire, had to be passed through the Democratic Party, because Republicans stopped caring about it some time in the late nineteenth century).
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat:
Meant to ask when you first mentioned the old Commie prof – was there no pushback to his remarks about trump during the Q&A? this was a D council after all.
wjca
@Subsole:
Probably too long, but NOMINATED anyway.
wjca
Perhaps not. Doesn’t mean it isn’t needed.
UncleEbeneezer
@Chet Murthy: People spend way too much time on debating whether lefty journalist is a Russian asset or not. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter whether they push Russian talking points because GRU somehow tricked them, or because they just sincerely agree with Russian talking points. It’s pretty easy to see who pushes Russian Propaganda and just so happens to constantly put their energy into dividing our coalition and who doesn’t. I don’t really care if they are getting their info pushed on them from Russia or they are just picking it up on their own. I don’t really care how deeply principled their beliefs are or not. Until Progressives and very loud Lefties start showing that they do any due diligence to avoid spreading Russian Propaganda, I’m gonna call them Russian Tools because that’s effectively what they likely are. That’s why this shit works. Putin knows he doesn’t have to directly recruit everyone as assets. There are plenty of people who will gladly do his work for him, for free. I put The Intercept, Salon, GG, Julian Assange, Code Pink, DSA, TYT, Chapo, Cornel West, Jill Stein etc., all under that umbrella via Occam’s razor. Basically anyone who hand-waves away concerns about Russian Propaganda.
wjca
On the left, perhaps. But on the center right, the critical point was more that McCain’s choice of Palin showed a very serious lack of judgement. That or inexcusably poor vetting.
Kathleen
@Matt McIrvin: What is he supposed to do?
StringOnAStick
@Marmot: The phrase you’re looking for is “enhance the contradictions” . Hearing it is your best indication that, as stated above, you’re talking to someone who is an authoritarian with a Marxist gloss.
Manyakitty
@schrodingers_cat: reasonable
schrodingers_cat
@Anyway: Hard to pushback on Zoom. It was both sidesy. Oh Trump is bad but Biden is not much better.
David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 Koch
@Baud:
Not even Dennis Eckersley?
Bill Arnold
@The Pale Scot:
Did you even read her next two short sentences?
Here they are:
That means Australian history.
artem1s
@Baud:
I would say Dems have been moving left for a lot longer than that. Blue and Yellow Dog Democrats have either left the party or figured out that a big integrated tent helps their constituents and gets them reelected to boot. The last vestiges of the White guys who voted with their unions left the party starting in the 90’s when they retired and didn’t need their unions anymore. Karl Rove promised the fundies they could have a life free from Blacks, Feminazis and teh Gheys so we got W for 8 years despite being a C+ Augustus failure and a Congress full of wackos. Then Obama got elected and that completed the arc of Johnson’s prediction about the Dems losing a couple of generations of voters and elections.
But there have been an equal number of Democrats who have been on a lifelong journey of learning about the actual history of the US and racism, misogyny and homophobia that have embraced diversity and now celebrate it in whatever form it takes. The need to belong is strong. But the GOP didn’t count on parents’ and communities need to protect their LGBTQ children, family and friends would be a stronger force. Now they have to contend with women who are choosing their lives over ‘belonging’ to their country clubs and religions and communities that hate them.
In every decade the Democratic Party has faced the challenge of whether to become more diverse in their policies and leadership and they have chosen to stick it out and accept more and more people as ‘normal’ no matter what the Right has to say about them. The party has systematically rejected those members who want to close the door on the next group needing and asking for protection. When you make the tent bigger, the more opportunities members have to see a face in that crowd that looks like them. And you can learn that you don’t have to look all the same to belong. It’s taken a long time but the casual acceptance of single sex marriage and a mixed race woman serving as VP is a huge accomplishment. This is the center of the Democratic Party now. The only side to the right of this new center are the ones who still believe only White male Haa-vaad grads should be in charge of who should be allowed to make decisions and earn all the money. They may believe everyone else should politely stay out of the way and not upset the wingnut, gun toting right – or do or say anything that might cause the stock market to dip. But this administration is pretty consistently telling them to fuck off.