Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
October 7 was the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was an honor to join President Trump in NY today to pay our respects and remember the lives lost in the horrific terrorist attack one year ago today. I had the additional honor of being accompanied by Yael, Adi, and Roy Alexander whose son and brother, Edan, an American citizen, is still held captive by Hamas. Today and every day we pray for the swift return of all the hostages and a victory over those who sponsored and perpetrated October 7.
People in Florida are evacuating before Hurricane Milton is expected to hit the state’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday evening, bringing tornadoes, high winds, a dramatic storm surge, and upwards of 15 inches of rain. Milton grew from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in a little over a day, fed by water in the Gulf of Mexico that climate change has pushed in some places to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 degrees Celsius) higher than normal. Veteran Florida meteorologist and hurricane specialist John Morales choked up as he called it “horrific.”
President Joe Biden has approved an emergency declaration for Florida, enabling the federal government to move supplies in ahead of the storm’s arrival, but the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has refused to take a call from Vice President Kamala Harris about planning for the storm. When asked about DeSantis’s refusal at today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that the president and vice president have reached out to give support to the people of Florida.
As for DeSantis, “It’s up to him if he wants to respond to us or not. But what we're doing is we’re working with state and local officials to make sure that we are pre-positioned to make sure that we are ready to be there for the communities that are going to be impacted. We are doing the job… to protect the communities and to make sure that they have everything that is needed." When asked about DeSantis’s snub, Harris answered: “It’s just utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish, and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”
Before this year, Florida had goals of moving toward clean energy, but in May 2024, DeSantis signed a law to restructure the state’s energy policy so that addressing climate change would no longer be a priority. The law deleted any mention of climate change in state laws. Saying that “Florida rejects the designs of the left to weaken our energy grid, pursue a radical climate agenda, and promote foreign adversaries,” the governor posted a graphic on X that said the law would “INSULATE FLORIDA FROM GREEN ZEALOTS….”
Like DeSantis, Trump and Project 2025, a playbook for the next Republican administration, authored by allies of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and closely associated with Trump and Republican vice presidential candidate Ohio senator J.D. Vance, take the position that concerns about climate change are overblown. Project 2025 says the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, whose duties include issuing hurricane warnings, is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” It calls for either eliminating its functions, sending them to other agencies, privatizing them, or putting them under the control of states and territories.
The U.S. Supreme Court came back in session today in Washington, D.C. It has decided not to hear arguments about whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTLA) overrules Texas’s state abortion ban. EMTLA requires that hospitals provide emergency abortion care to save a woman’s life or stop organ failure or loss of fertility. Texas’s ban remains in place.
As legal analyst Joyce White Vance commented: “At least no one can pretend we don’t understand the consequences for women, & others, of putting appointments to the Court back in [Republican] control.”
The Georgia Supreme Court today reinstated the state’s six-week abortion ban after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, appointed in 2012 by Republican governor Nathan Deal, decided last week that the law violates Georgia’s Constitution. In his decision, McBurney wrote that “liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”
McBurney’s decision came shortly after a state investigation revealed that at least two women in Georgia died after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision struck down the abortion protections the court put in place in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. In anticipation of an end to Roe, Georgia governor Brian Kemp in 2019 signed a six-week abortion ban prohibiting the procedure before most women know they’re pregnant. The Dobbs decision allowed that law to go into effect.
The Georgia Supreme Court stayed McBurney’s decision during the state’s appeal of it. Chris Geidner of Law Dork noted that the court did leave in place McBurney’s block on the law’s provision that district attorneys can have access to “health records” where an abortion is performed or where someone who received an abortion lives.
In her attempt to reach new audiences, Vice President Harris sat down for an interview with Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast to talk about women’s issues. Call Her Daddy is the second most popular podcast in the country, reaching as many as 2 million downloads per episode. According to NPR’s Elena Moore, Call Her Daddy’s audience is 70% women, 93% under 45.
Cooper began the interview by acknowledging that she does not usually talk about politics, but “at the end of the day, I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women and I’m not a part of it…. I am so aware I have a very mixed audience when it comes to politics, so please hear me when I say [that] my goal today is not to change your political affiliation. What I’m hoping is that you’re able to listen to a conversation that isn’t too different from the ones that we’re having here every week.” Cooper said she had also reached out to Trump, adding: “If he also wants to have a meaningful, in-depth conversation about women’s rights in this country, then he is welcome on Call Her Daddy any time.”
On the podcast, Cooper and Harris talked about the prevalence of sexual assault before addressing abortion. When Cooper quoted Trump’s promise to protect women, Harris noted that he was the one who appointed the three extremists to the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade and that 20 states now have abortion bans, some with no exceptions for rape or incest. Harris pointed out that the majority of women who receive abortion care are mothers and that every state in the South except for Virginia has an abortion ban. For a woman in those states—and one out of every three American women lives in one—the journey is expensive, hard, and traumatic.
“You don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government shouldn’t be telling her what to do,” Harris said. “And that’s what’s so outrageous about it, is a bunch of these guys up in these state capitals are writing these decisions because they somehow have decided that they’re in a better position to tell you what’s in your best interest than you are to know what’s in your own best interest. It’s outrageous.” Harris pointed out that she is the first vice president or president to go to a reproductive health care clinic, and she noted that those clinics perform Pap smears, breast cancer screening, and HIV testing and that they are having to close because of the abortion bans. She noted, though, that since Dobbs, people across the country have chosen to protect abortion rights.
The article in the right-wing National Review about the interview was titled: “Kamala Goes on Sex Podcast to Lie about Georgia Abortion Law.”
On Call Her Daddy, Harris also brought her economic plans for an “opportunity economy” to a younger audience. When Cooper asked her how she was going to help young people “not feel left behind,” Harris agreed it is “a very real issue and we need to take it seriously.” She promised to address housing costs by increasing the housing supply, working with home builders in the private sector to build three million new housing units by the end of her first term; help with $25,000 downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers; and enact tax cuts for 100 million middle-class working people, including a $6,000 tax credit for new parents to help them afford the costs of a child’s first year.
The Committee for a Responsible Budget noted today that a moderate reading of Harris’s economic plans suggest they would increase the U.S. debt by about $3.5 trillion through 2035. A similar examination of Trump’s plans says they would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion.
Meanwhile, today, Trump openly embraced the race science favored by Nazis. In a scattered call to right-wing host Hugh Hewitt’s show, Trump called Harris a communist and lied—again—that she has let 13,000 murderers into the country. And then he claimed that murder is in a person’s genes, and “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” He has also noted that “it would be very dangerous” for anyone to admit they were voting for Kamala Harris at one of his rallies because they would “get hurt.”
Hurricane Milton spurred meteorologist John Morales to step forward to take a stand, sharing his thoughts after Hurricane Helene hit. “Something’s shifted,” he wrote. “And it’s not just the climate.” He noted that with Helene on the way, “I did what I’ve done during my entire 40 year career—I tried to warn people. Except that the warning was not well received by everyone. A person accused me of being a ‘climate militant,’ a suggestion that I’m embellishing extreme weather threats to drive an agenda. Another simply said that my predictions were ‘an exaggeration.’
“But it wasn’t an exaggeration,” he wrote.
“For decades I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely…. But no one can hide from the truth. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, are becoming more extreme. I must communicate the growing threats from the climate crisis come hell or high water—pun intended.”
And then [Trump] claimed that murder is in a person’s genes, and “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent filing to the D.C. District Court in the Trump v. United States presidential-immunity case both fleshes out and sharpens the evidence of Donald Trump’s sprawling criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. To understand the filing’s larger significance as well as its limitations, we must first review a bit of recent history.
In its shocking decision on July 1 to grant the presidency at least presumed immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority showed once again that it was intent on immunizing one president in particular: Donald Trump. The Court majority’s decision, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, was explicit. It held, for example, that Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence into voiding the 2020 election results on January 6 constituted “official conduct” from which Trump “is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.” That presumed immunity, the Court contended, would disappear only if the prosecution could convince the courts that bringing the case to trial would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”
The Court thus remanded the case back to the D.C. District Court to decide the matter, along with the question of whether Trump is actually immune to the rest of the charges against him. How, though, could the prosecution of a president or former president over an “official act” fail to intrude on presidential authority? Seemingly, anything pertaining to Trump’s contacts with the vice president as he presided in his constitutional role as president of the Senate—as well as Trump’s contacts with the Department of Justice, which the Court also singled out and which the prosecution, significantly, felt compelled to omit from its revised indictment—deserves, as the Court sees it, virtually ironclad protection, a powerful blow against the entire January 6 indictment.
Although the sweeping outcome of Trump v. United States took most legal commentators by surprise, its protection of Trump was completely predictable given the Court’s previous conduct regarding the January 6 insurrection. The refusal of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to recuse themselves from any matter related to the insurrection, despite their own conflicted positions—Thomas due to the direct involvement of his wife, Ginni Thomas, in the subversion; Alito because of his flag-waving support of Trump’s election denials—has received the most public attention concerning the Court majority’s partisan partiality. But another set of telltale signs becomes apparent after a closer tracking of the Court’s decision making.
Almost as soon as the case against Trump came before D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Supreme Court played along with the Trump lawyers’ efforts to delay the trial until after the November 2024 election. First, after Chutkan ruled against Trump’s absolute-immunity claims in December 2023, Special Counsel Smith asked the Supreme Court to expedite matters by hearing the case immediately, not waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals to rule on Trump’s appeal of Chutkan’s decision. The Supreme Court refused. Two months later, though, when the appeals court ruled against Trump and set a new trial date, the Supreme Court dragged its feet for as long as possible before announcing that it would take up the case after all. It then set the date for oral arguments as late as possible, at the end of April. This meant that even before hearing the case, the Court made it highly unlikely that Trump’s trial would proceed in a timely manner, effectively immunizing Trump until after the election.
Although radical in its long-term reconstruction of the American presidency, the ruling more immediately affirmed and extended the Court’s protection of Trump from prosecution. By remanding the case to the D.C. Circuit Court to decide what in the indictment constitutes official (and, therefore, presumably immune) conduct, the justices guaranteed that no trial would occur until after Election Day. After that, meanwhile, should Trump win the election, no trial would occur at all, because he would certainly fire Smith and shut down the proceedings.
Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.
In remounting his case, Smith has taken the opportunity to release previously unknown details, some of which he says he doesn’t even plan to present at trial, that underscore the depravity as well as the extent of Trump’s criminal actions. Consider, for example, Smith’s telling of Trump’s reaction to the news from one of his staff, at the height of the violence on January 6, that his tweets attacking Pence had placed Pence’s life in extreme danger. “So what?” Trump reportedly replied. He had clearly intended for his tweets to reach the mob at the Capitol. His nonchalance about the vice president’s life epitomizes the lengths to which he would go to complete his coup d’état.
But the real force of Smith’s filing is in its tight presentation of the evidence of a criminal conspiracy in minute detail, dating back to the summer before the 2020 election, when Trump began publicly casting doubts on its legitimacy should he not be declared the winner. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” he told the Republican National Convention in his nomination-acceptance speech in August 2020.
From that point forward, Trump was at the center of every effort to keep him in power, even once he was fully aware that he had no grounds to contest Joe Biden’s victory. There were his private operatives sowing chaos at polling places and vote-counting centers, the scheming to declare victory on Election Night before the results were in, the bogus legal challenges, the fake-elector fraud, the plot to deny official certification by Congress on January 6, and finally the insurrection itself. “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” one witness reports Trump saying. “You still have to fight like hell.”
The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.
It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage. Concerning specific charges that Trump’s speechmaking contributed to the insurrection, the Court allowed that “there may be contexts in which the President speaks in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.” Quoting from an earlier Court decision, the ruling then states that determining these matters would require that the district court undertake “objective analysis of [the] ‘content, form, and context’” of the speeches in question, a “necessarily fact-bound analysis.” Likewise, regarding the allegations apart from Trump’s supposedly official communications and public speeches, the justices enjoined the district court, on remand, to “carefully analyze” those charges “to determine whether they too involve conduct for which the President may be immune from prosecution.”
Citing those exact phrases as the Court’s standard of inquiry and proof, Smith then offers evidence that every count in the revised indictment concerns either technically official conduct undeserving of immunity or unofficial conduct involving Trump’s private actions as a candidate and not his official duties as president. These actions include his efforts to pressure state officials, preposterously presented by Trump’s defense attorneys as official inquiries into election integrity. They include his conversations about elector slates, about which the president has no official duties. They also encompass all of his speechmaking about the allegedly crooked election, up to and including his incitement at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, which was not an official function.
Above all, Smith nails down a matter that the Court’s opinion went out of its way to declare “official” and presumably immune: Trump’s efforts to pressure Pence into declining to certify Biden’s win. Although the filing acknowledges that the Court had held that these conversations between Trump and Pence about “their official responsibilities” qualified as “official,” it rebuts the presumption that those discussions therefore qualify as immune. The filing observes that the discussions did not concern Pence’s duties as president of the Senate “writ large,” but only his distinct duties overseeing the certification of a presidential election—a process in which a president, whether or not he is a candidate for reelection, has, by the Framers’ considered design, no official role.
Here the logic of Smith’s argument cuts to the quick. By the Court majority’s own standard, as stated in its Trump v. United States decision, the presumption of immunity for official actions would disappear only if a prosecutor could demonstrate that bringing criminal charges against a president or former president would not present “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Because certification of a presidential election, the subject of Trump’s “official” pressuring, involves neither the authority nor the functions of the executive branch, the immunity claims concerning that pressuring are therefore groundless—according to the Court majority’s own logic.
The rest of Trump and Pence’s interactions do not even qualify as official, Smith shows. In all of their other postelection, in-person conversations and private phone calls, Trump and Pence were acting not in their capacities as president and vice president but as running mates pondering their electoral prospects, even after Biden had been declared the winner. If, as the Court itself has stated, context is important with regard to speechmaking, so it is important with regard to communications between the top officials of the executive branch. To be sure, Smith allows, Trump and Pence “naturally may have touched upon arguably official responsibilities,” but “the overall context and content of the conversations demonstrate that they were primarily frank exchanges between two candidates on a shared ticket”—strictly unofficial conduct.
In all, by recasting the case against Trump in view of the Court’s immunity decision, Smith has drawn upon that very ruling to establish that none of Trump’s actions in connection with January 6 cited in the revised indictment is immune from prosecution. And in doing that, he has further discredited an already discredited Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, important as it is with respect to Smith’s specific case, the filing cannot come close to undoing the damage that Trump v. United States has wrought, with its authorization of an authoritarian American regime. The very fact that Smith had to omit from both his revised indictment and his filing Trump’s nefarious but official dealings with the Justice Department, including his brazen hiring and firing of top law-enforcement officials on the basis of who would do his personal bidding, shows how fearsomely the Court’s immunity decision has constrained the special counsel. There was a great deal more criminal behavior by Trump and his co-conspirators, as laid out in detail in the House January 6 committee report, that Smith could not touch because the Court has effectively immunized it as “official” activity under the executive branch’s authority.
These limitations show all over again how the Court has given the president absolute license to rule like a tyrant, against which even the ablest special counsel is virtually powerless. Nothing in Smith’s filing alleviates Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s judgment in her forthright dissent in Trump v. United States that the decision empowers the president, acting in his official capacity, to order the assassination of political rivals, to take a bribe in exchange for a pardon, to organize a military coup with impunity: “Immune, immune, immune.” That Smith managed to outsmart the Court as much as he did is a remarkable feat that could have important results—but only if Kamala Harris succeeds in winning the presidency.
On the basis of their past decisions, it is reasonable to expect that both the D.C. district court under Judge Chutkan and the U.S. Court of Appeals will rule in favor of Smith. Trump v. United States would then go once again before the Supreme Court. This will happen if Harris wins the election, because a Justice Department under her administration would almost certainly allow Smith to remain to continue prosecution of Trump. What, then, would the Court do? Would it uphold those decisions and throw Trump upon the mercy of a D.C. federal jury? Or would it strike those decisions down, thereby redoubling the disgrace it earned the first time around?
The only way the Court can avoid that dilemma is if Trump wins the election, an outcome that its conservative majority would now have all the more reason to desire. But what happens if, as seems highly possible, the election leads to litigation, much as the 2020 election did, only this time the Court is left to make the final decision? Will the Court then intervene as Trump’s enabler once again, installing him as a constitutionally tainted president, allowing him to kill the indictment against him, and to pardon those convicted of violent crimes in the attack on the Capitol whom he calls “hostages”? The Court, in Trump v. United States, claimed that it was protecting the sanctity of the presidency, but if it aids Trump in his attempt to escape justice for his January 6 insurrection, it will further seal its illegitimacy while also sealing MAGA’s triumph—and, with that, the majority of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, will pay a crushing price.
(...) we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October,” host Scott Pelley said to the camera last night before 60 Minutes aired an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. This year, both Harris and Republican nominee former president Donald Trump accepted an invitation for an interview.
“Then a week ago,” Pelley said, “Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story,” Pelley said. “Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Leslie Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.
“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and election day. Our questions addressed the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, and the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Both campaigns understood this special would go ahead if either candidate backed out.”
And with that, 60 Minutes aired its interview with Vice President Harris.
Trump broke a fifty-year tradition so his false world would not be challenged by reality. He apparently wants to make sure voters cannot base their decisions about the country’s future on facts. Hiding reality is in keeping with his continued refusal to release his tax returns or a medical report—even after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania—or the video from the incident at Arlington National Cemetery, instead insisting that people take him at his word about what happened.
If voters trust his disinformation campaign, rather than thinking things through for themselves, who will his policies help?
A bombshell story from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward today revealed that in 2020, when he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it.
A Trump aide told Woodward that Trump and Putin have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to comment: “What possible business could an out-of-office U.S. president have to call Vladimir Putin seven times?” Woodward recounts a moment when Trump told a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
The Woodward book also says that when South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was visiting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, in March 2024, Graham said “Hey, let’s call Trump.” According to Woodward, an aide brought MBS a bag full of burner phones, one of which was labeled “TRUMP 45.”
This news highlights the fact that Trump retained classified documents when he left the White House, carrying them with him to Mar-a-Lago, where he tried to hide them from federal officials. A grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts for those actions, but Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case in July after concluding that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.
Trump’s campaign came out swinging after the story broke, with Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung calling Woodward “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”
In contrast to Trump’s disinformation campaign, Vice President Harris is running a normal campaign, offering policy proposals. Today she proposed a plan to permit Medicare to help cover the costs of long-term home health care aides for seniors. Harris announced the plan on ABC’s The View, where she spoke of the so-called sandwich generation, people—mostly women—who are taking care of their elderly parents at the same time they are also taking care of children. “It’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said, adding that many end up having to leave their jobs. She also called for Medicare to cover vision and hearing care to enable seniors to live independently for longer.
Harris said the money to pay for the new services will come from savings realized through Medicare’s new ability to negotiate drug prices—an ability Republicans are eager to end—and through cracking down on Medicare fraud. A fact sheet about the plan emphasizes that it will enable the government to work with the private sector to expand the home care workforce and provide more access to telehealth.
Her plan also calls for stopping states from seizing family homes of recently deceased Medicaid beneficiaries to restore funding, a program called “Medicaid estate recovery.” Those seizures particularly hurt rural and minority populations, she noted, preventing them from building wealth.
Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times note that both expanded home care benefits and drug negotiations are popular. KFF, which conducts health policy research, reports that Medicaid estate recovery has been criticized because it “falls primarily on individuals with limited incomes, raises little revenue, and is applied very unevenly across the states.”
Deepa Shivaram of NPR noted that a relatively large percentage of middle-aged and older women remain undecided in this race and Harris’s plan speaks to their needs. The plan would also bring more money and care workers into rural towns with aging populations, giving those areas an economic boost.
In a fact sheet, the Harris-Walz campaign noted that Trump is focused on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, has repeatedly called for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and gave clemency to those abusing the system. As Amy B. Wang and Azi Paybarah explained in the Washington Post: “In his last year in office, Trump commuted the sentences of at least five people who collectively filed nearly $1.6 billion in fraudulent claims through Medicare or Medicaid.”
On The View, Harris said, “In this election, people are ready for a new generation of leadership that’s about fixing problems.”
The 2020 60 Minutes interview for which Trump demanded an apology last week was the one in which he promised his health care plan was “fully developed,” then angrily walked out. His exit was apparently planned, for shortly after his departure, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany walked up to Stahl with a giant book, saying: “Lesley, the President wanted me to deliver his health care plan. It’s a little heavy.”
Trump and McEnany likely expected that the audience would remember their theatrical move rather than the reality, which was that the book contained no Trump healthcare plan because one didn’t exist.
Four years later, it still doesn’t. Trump said at the September 10 presidential debate that he has the “concepts of a plan.”
CNN today set a deadline of Thursday for Trump to accept its invitation for an October 23 presidential debate. Harris has already accepted.
Elon Musk’s ‘Free’ Starlink for Hurricane Helene Victims Will Cost at Least $400
Upon inspection, the offer of a free month of Starlink service seems to be the type of deal you might give to any new customer.
As Elon Musk likes to do whenever disaster hits somewhere in the world, Hurricane Helene was another opportunity to show off his generosity and make himself part of the news. This time, Musk made headlines with a promise that SpaceX Starlink would be free for 30 days to help in places where fiber and cellular infrastructure might have been knocked offline. More than 200 people have been identified as dead in the disaster.
But the catch is that it’s really not free at all. It really looks like not much more than a glorified new-customer promotion.
For one, anyone interested in taking up the offer still has to pay approximately $400 for the dish itself (including shipping and tax) and they’re getting automatically rolled into a $120 per-month contract when the free month ends...
Evan Dyer@EvanDyerCBC
1h
AP investigation finds that Donald Trump had his "God Bless the USA Bible" (AKA "the Trump Bible") made in Hangzhou, China.
Customs data suggest he paid less than $3 per bible. He sells them to his followers for $59.99 -- or $1000 for a signed copy.
Yesterday we learned from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it. To be clear, this equipment was not the swabs we now use at home, but appears to be what at the time was a new point-of-care machine from Abbott Laboratories that claimed to be the fastest way to test for Covid-19.
Journalist Karly Kingsley points out that at the time, central lab testing to diagnose Covid-19 infections took a long time, causing infections to spread. Machines like Abbott’s were hard to get. Trump chose to send them to Putin—not to charge him for them, or to negotiate for the release of Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration, but to give them to him—rather than keeping them for Americans.
It’s hard to overstate just what an astonishing story this is. In 2016, Republicans stood firm against Putin and backed the arming of Ukraine to stand against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. But that summer, at Trump’s urging, the party changed its platform to weaken its support of Ukraine. In 2020, it appears, Trump chose to give lifesaving equipment to Putin rather than use it for Americans. And in 2024, Trump’s willingness to undermine the United States to cozy up to an adversary his own party stood against less than a decade ago does not appear to be a deal breaker for Republicans.
As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it: “What has this country come to if the revelation that Trump secretly sent COVID testing machines to Putin while thousands of Americans were dying, in part because of a shortage of testing machines here, doesn't disqualify him to be President?” He continued: “Donald Trump helped keep Putin alive during the pandemic and let Americans die. This revelation is damning. It's disqualifying. He cannot be President of the United States.”
Increasingly, Trump’s behavior seems to parrot the dictators he appears to admire.
After 60 Minutes called him out for breaking a fifty-year tradition of both candidates talking to 60 Minutes and backing out of an interview to which he had agreed, Trump today accused the producers of 60 Minutes of cutting Vice President Kamala Harris’s answers to make her look good. He suggested that such cuts were “illegal” and possibly “a major Campaign Finance violation” that “must be investigated, starting today!” “The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY!” he wrote. Trump is trying to cover for his own failure by attacking CBS in an echo of dictators determined to control the media.
In a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to have declined to appear at another presidential debate with Vice President Harris. After declaring he had won the previous debate with Harris and rehashing many of his grievances, he wrote: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!”
As Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post recounted yesterday, a report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Trump White House prevented a real investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. More than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh sent to the FBI tip line went directly to the White House, where they were never investigated, and the FBI was told not to pursue corroborating evidence of the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez although lawyers for the women presented the names of dozens of people who could testify to the truth of their allegations.
A number of senators said the lack of corroborating evidence convinced them to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Steve Benen of MSNBC recalled, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said at the time that it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation,” while the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the 2018 FBI report “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”
After he left office, Trump told author Michael Wolff that he had gone to bat for Kavanaugh, saying: “I…fought like hell for Kavanaugh—and I saved his life, and I saved his career.” Kavanaugh was the crucial vote for Trump’s right-wing agenda, including ending the federal recognition of abortion rights by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Ken Bensinger reported in the New York Times today that Trump’s team has refused to participate in preparations for a transition to a potential Trump presidency. Normally, the nonpartisan transition process, dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has candidates setting up teams as much as six months before the election to begin vetting and hiring political appointees and working with the administration in office to make sure the agencies continue to run smoothly.
With the election less than a month away, Trump has neither signed the required agreements nor signed the transition’s ethics plan that would require him to disclose private donors to the transition and limit them to contributions of no more than $5,000. Without that agreement, there are no limits to the money the Trump transition can take. Trump has also refused to sign an agreement with the White House requiring that anyone receiving classified information have a security clearance. Currently, his aides cannot review federal records.
Trump ignored the traditional transition period in 2016, cutting off communications with President Barack Obama’s team. He refused to allow incoming president Joe Biden access to federal agencies in 2020, hampering Biden’s ability to get his administration in place in a timely fashion. Now it’s possible that Trump sees no need for a normal transition because Project 2025, on which he appears to be relying, has been working on one for many months.
It calls for him to fire most federal employees, reinstating the policy he started at the end of his term. To fill their positions, the Heritage Foundation has been vetting loyalists now for months, preparing a list of job candidates to put in place a new, right-wing agenda.
Yesterday, on California’s KFI radio station, Trump told host John Kobylt that Tom Homan of Project 2025, who as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversaw the family separation policy at the southern border, will be “coming on board” a new Trump administration.
This afternoon, Trump told an audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he expects to put former rival Vivek Ramaswamy into an important position in his administration. On October 7, 2024, Ramaswamy suggested on social media that he wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. He wrote: “Shut down the entitlement state & you solve most of the immigration problem right there. We need to man up & fix the root cause that draws migrants here in the first place: the welfare state. But no one seems to want to say that part out loud, because too many native-born Americans are addicted to it themselves.”
Trump has expressed frustration with the independence of the Federal Reserve, expressing a desire to make it answer to the president. In an interview with Barron’s, one of his advisors, Scott Bessent, has floated the idea of creating a shadow Fed chair until the term of the current chair, Jerome Powell, ends, thus undercutting him without facing a fight over firing the Fed chair.
This agenda is not a popular one in the U.S., but Trump is getting a boost as Russian operatives work to swing downballot races toward the Republicans. In a briefing on Monday, October 7, experts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told reporters that China and Iran are trying to influence the upcoming election and that “Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians. Russian influence actors have planned, and likely created and disseminated, content, particularly over social media, intended to encourage the election of congressional candidates that Moscow assesses will oppose aid to Ukraine.”
Russia, an ODNI spokesperson said, uses “influence-for-hire firms, or commercial firms with expertise in these type[s] of activities.” It also coopts “witting and unwitting Americans to work on Russia’s behalf,” to “launder their influence narratives through what are perceived as more authentic U.S. voices.”
Not all of Trump’s supporters appear eager to stick around to see if Trump will win another term. Today news broke that Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive officer of OverStock, who became a fervent advocate of the idea that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election, has left the country, apparently permanently, to live in Dubai. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne, as is President Biden’s son Hunter. The younger Biden sued Byrne for defamation last November after Byrne claimed Hunter Biden sought a bribe from Iran.
In September, Biden’s lawyers were trying to schedule a date for Byrne’s deposition when his lawyer abruptly “claimed for the first time that Defendant has moved his residence to Dubai and if Plaintiff wanted to take his in-person deposition counsel would have to fly to Dubai to do so, to which Plaintiff responded with various related inquiries to try to resolve this matter and defense counsel stated Defendant would not be returning to the United States for the foreseeable future.”
Byrne claimed to have fled the U.S. because the Venezuelan government has put a bounty on him, but as Biden’s lawyers note, “the Defendant’s truthfulness is directly at issue.”
For three decades, policymakers have promised to address the climate crisis. For three decades, global emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to climb, giving rise to the suspicion that the capitalist world system is incapable of reducing CO2 emissions globally. The facts speak for themselves, as greenhouse gas emissions have increased every year in the 21st century, with the exception of the crisis years of 2009 and 2020.1
And this trend does not seem to be changing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently published an emissions forecast according to which global CO2 emissions will rise this year and next, reaching a new historic high in 2023. A trend reversal is „not in sight,“ the IEA said.2 Despite all the apologetics in the mass media, capitalism has thus impressively demonstrated that it can only „lower“ global emissions at the price of a world economic crisis (This was, as already mentioned, only the case in 2009 and 2020).
It is, as if mankind is waiting for Godot. And this wait is in vain not only in the absurd theater, but also in the no less absurd, late capitalist reality. In the following, we will therefore explain, with recourse to Marxian value and crisis theory, why the hope for a capitalist solution to the climate crisis is futile.
Capital as a total social and global mode of reproduction destroys all attempts to establish a resource-saving economy. The innermost nature of capital inevitably produces an ecologically self-destructive economic system. Consequently, a sustainable way of life is impossible within the framework of the current mode of production. This introductory thesis will be substantiated and justified in the following.
Capital: irrational self purpose, rational method
Money, functioning as capital, has to be accumulated within a permanent investment cycle. Economic growth is only the economically visible expression of this process. The accumulation movement, however, is bound to a „material basis“ in commodity production. At least since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, it has become clear that this process of capital accumulation is linked to commodity production and thus remains dependent on the exploitation of labor – and cannot, for example, be maintained permanently on the financial markets on the basis of pure speculative processes.
How does this process of accumulation of capital take place in concrete terms? A company invests its capital in wage labor, raw materials, machines, production sites in order to sell the goods produced there at a profit – wage labor being the source of surplus value. Ultimately, capital accumulates ever larger quanta of exploited, abstract labor in this boundless process of exploitation. After this, the increased capital is reinvested – in more raw materials, machines, etc., to start a new cycle of exploitation (those capitalists who do not do this and, for example, spent their surplus value, perish in the market competition). The capital that will prevail in the competition will be the one that can offer the most favorable price. This can be achieved by an increase of productivity and cost reduction of all kinds (acceleration of transport, externalization of all consequential costs, saving of labor, etc., relocation of the production site to low-wage countries).
The apparent rationality of capitalist commodity production thus serves an irrational end in itself – the boundless multiplication of the capital employed, the substance of which is wage labor as the only commodity that can yield surplus value. The concrete use value of a commodity is thus only relevant for capital as a necessary carrier of surplus value – whether it is food, smartphones or landmines. And this is, after all, only too reasonable for every market subject, for every capitalist – no one invests his capital in order to receive less or just as much afterwards. It must be „worthwhile“, yield a return.
On the level of society as a whole, this economically „reasonable“ logic unfolds its devastating destructive potential, since with successful capital accumulation also the expenditures for the production process – raw materials and energy – must be permanently increased. Consequently, capital is driven by a growth compulsion. Thus, even capitalist „business as usual“ resembles a process of burning more and more resources. Following its very own inner principle, capital must „burn“ ever larger quantities of energy and raw materials in order to maintain its accumulation movement – until it comes up against its „outer limit“, which consists in the finiteness of the planet’s resources. In a nutshell: The permanent growth compulsion of this economic system ultimately results from the nature of capital itself.
Capital as a world-burning machine
Capital thus strives for the highest possible „reproduction“; it is money that wants to become more money – and nothing else matters. This „hollow“, self-referential process is blind to all social or ecological consequences of its constantly increasing exploitation activity. Karl Marx famously introduced the concept of the „automatic subject“3 for this overall momentum of capital as a social relation. Automatic, i.e. self-referential, because, although it is produced by the market subjects striving for the greatest possible capital valorization,4 it confronts society – forming a dynamic of its own „behind the backs of the producers“, as Marx famously wrote5 – as an alien, tendentially unstable power, as a crisis-ridden „factual constraint“.
The strained and stressed wold climate, the visibly dwindling resources of this world form the ever narrower eye of the needle through which this irrational process of capital valorization must squeeze itself with ever greater friction. Both ecological crisis processes – the resource crisis as well as the climate crisis – are decisively promoted by this valorization process, which acts on a global level like a „subject“ automatically striving for maximum profit. The capitalist world economy, oriented on the self purpose of boundless capital utilization, on profit maximization, thus functions de facto as a world destruction machine, in which the real, concrete world is burned in order to perpetuate the blind growth of the abstraction of value until the social or ecological collapse of capital. Capitalism is thus, due to this necessity of permanent expansion, the logical opposite of a resource-saving economic mode, which would be necessary to ensure a survival of human civilization.
Consequently, capital has to „burn“ ever larger amounts of energy and raw materials following its very own driving law of endless accumulation. The resource demand of the global capitalist exploitation engine will continue to increase until it reaches its aforementioned „outer limit“. The permanent growth compulsion of the capitalist system hence results from the nature of capital itself. It is capital, that destroy the earth.
Productivity increase as a fire accelerator
This process of world-burning is decisively fueled by the ever higher productivity of the capitalist world economy. It seems absurd at first glance, but it is precisely the tremendous productivity increases of capitalist commodity production that contribute significantly to the escalation of the ecological crisis. Since labor forms the substance of capital, the permanent increases in productivity compel late capitalism to push the „efficient“ waste of resources and raw materials to the extreme. In the context of capital valorization, all ecological resources and raw materials are only relevant as carriers of value – i.e. abstract human labor. But the higher the increase in productivity, the less abstract labor is reified in a given quantum of commodity. If a car manufacturer increases productivity by ten percent through innovations, then he must also sell ten percent more cars in order to utilize the same mass of value at the same product price – or lay off every tenth worker.
In order to maintain the valorization process of capital, more goods must be produced and sold as productivity increases. Therefore, the greater the productivity of the global industrial machinery, the greater its hunger for resources, since the mass of value per unit produced tends to decrease. An attempt to introduce a resource-conserving mode of production in the capitalist world economy is thus impossible – it would be tantamount to capital destruction. The increase in productivity, which is actually indispensable for the realization of a resource-conserving mode of economy, acts in capitalism as a fire accelerator, since here a blind, functionalist rationality must serve the irrational self purpose of boundless capital utilization.6
The aforementioned tendency to ever more accelerated, efficient waste of resources results from this market- and competition driven compulsion to extreme, ‚irrational†rationalization within the capitalist system. This growing contradiction between productive forces and the capitalist mode of production also explains the increasing tendencies towards planned obsolescence in the design of goods. This is the intentional wear and tear that is foreseen in the design of a product at the earliest possible stage. The sooner a product breaks down after the warranty expires, the sooner the corresponding market demand arises, which is necessary for the realization of capital valorization.
Producing for the dump
Late capitalism thus literally produces for the garbage dump in order to create new demand for the faltering exploitation machine. This is especially true for the high-tech industry. Nowadays it is hardly possible for consumers to replace even the batteries of smartphones or notebooks made of aluminum – while approaches to modular design in the IT-industry have been abandoned.7 One close look at the latest glued-together notebooks, where even the exchange of RAM modules or SSDs is now no longer possible, is actually enough to realize this absurdity.
On fine, prime example of this capitalist tendency to efficiently waste resources is provided by the U.S. corn industry, which since the Green Revolution of the 1970s has been delighting U.S. consumers with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a sugar concentrate that has supplanted ordinary sugar and is now found in a myriad of food products. Filmmaker Curt Ellis, whose documentary „King Corn“8 explored the history and consequences of the industrialization of the U.S. corn industry, described the introduction of HFCS in an interview: „In the seventies, there was this huge increase in corn yields, and now these gigantic corn mountains were popping up all over the Midwest. Because of that, anything seemed helpful to be able to use those amounts of corn.“ Meanwhile, HFCS – developed by the food industry and linked to increases in obesity, diabetes, heart and liver disease – is found in „thousands“ of foods. „Our diets have become much sweeter,“ Ellis said. „High fructose corn syrup is everywhere; it’s in your spaghetti sauce or in a loaf of bread – in products where it wasn’t a generation ago.“9
Productivity increases in capitalist agribusiness thus do not lead to the conservation of limited natural resources, but to efforts to create new fields of demand by hook or by crook in order to maintain the valorization process – and if it has to be the human body that is abused as a HFCS dump. That is why the hunger for resources of the global exploitation machinery continues to increase, that is why new „markets“ and disease-causing products are created, while hundreds of millions of marginalized people have to go hungry or starve because they are excluded from the exploitation of capital and cannot form a solvent demand.
The illusion of the „Green New Deal
Since such murderous and ultimately self destructive absurdities of capitalist commodity production are hardly discussed or even addressed in the mainstream, the capitalist climate crisis is currently supposed to be overcome primarily by more capitalism. In view of the increasing global ecological crises, the ideology of a „green“ capitalism will play a central role in legitimizing the capitalist mode of production in the future. Germany can serve as a current prime example. The economic foundation of the rise of the „Greens“ to a German governing party is the implicit hope for a new accumulation regime: for the „Green New Deal“, a comprehensive program for the ecological transformation of capitalist society, in which „ecological“ and „regenerative“ industries are to experience their breakthrough and assume the role of leading sectors of the economy. This is intended to overcome the social and ecological double crisis of late capitalism, that began with the exhaustion of the postwar Fordist boom in the 1970s.10
The overall social enforcement of the automobile in the 50ties an 60ties, the Fordist „automobilization“ of the industrial societies, brought lastly such a comprehensive transformation of the entire capitalism, which also led to a tremendous economic upswing, which ended in the 70s of the 20th century. Passenger cars and other new types of products, which went hand in hand with labor-intensive, new types of production methods, opened up new markets for the exploitation of capital. As a result, the states received the tax revenues that were used to create the necessary transportation infrastructure, the construction of which could not be accomplished within the framework of market processes. The automobilization of capitalism was accompanied by a comprehensive infrastructural reconstruction of the capitalist economies: from the paving of whole regions with highways and the development of a network of dealerships, garages and gas stations to the creation of extensive parking deserts in our cities.
However, it is hard to imagine that the production of alternative energy sources can generate such high employment effects as were achieved in the course of the automobilization of capitalism in the fifties or sixties. Solar cells and wind turbines are not efficiently produced in the same way as cars were 40 years ago, when thousands of workers under the Taylor system performed mindless manual operations on endless assembly lines at precisely timed intervals to produce a vehicle after hundreds of steps – each performed by one worker. With today’s general level of automation in production, similar problems of „overproductivity“ tend to apply to the manufacture of alternative energy sources, as they did in many older industries.
The „faux frais“ of capital
There are other crisis factors that stand in the way of a „green capitalism“. Due to this general meltdown of the share of wage labor in the production process, the relationship between the fields of capital valorization and the necessary state expenditures for infrastructure, which would arise and be incurred in the course of the implementation of a „Green New Deal,“ has long shifted toward infrastructure. Karl Marx would describe infrastructure expenditures at the level of the national economy as „faux frais,“ as dead costs that are necessary for the valorization process of capital without being part of it – and consequently have to be skimmed off it, mostly in the form of taxes. Consequently, strategic infrastructure is only built up massively when the economy is in a long boom phase, when capital has opened up new markets, i.e. when a new accumulation regime has been established, as most recently in the case of the automobile in the phase of postwar prosperity.
Neoliberalism with its tendency towards privatization – and thus capitalist „cannibalization“ of infrastructure – is precisely the expression of a lack of a new accumulation regime in which mass wage labor would be exploited in commodity production. Capital sells off its infrastructural „silverware“, so to speak, in order to gain short-term profit opportunities – at the price of long-term destabilization. This disproportion between the lack of exploitation opportunities and astronomical infrastructure costs, resulting from the high global productivity level, also thwarts the breakthrough of the eco-industries to a new accumulation regime: The astronomical infrastructural costs of an „energy turnaround“ are matched by insufficient job creation.
Thus, on the one hand, capital forms the central cause of the climate crisis by means of its boundless compulsion of valorization („economic growth“). At the same time, the increasing internal contradictions of this ‚over-productive†economic system in the form of the ailing infrastructure act as an additional crisis amplifier, undermining the resilience of capitalist societies to external, climatic shocks. Over-indebted states, crumbling dikes, collapsing bridges, bursting water pipes along with collapsing power grids, and an over-accumulation crisis that has led to an absurd concentration of wealth with simultaneous mass impoverishment even in the centers of the world system, such as the U.S. – this is the desolate state of late capitalism in the face of the now fully onset climate crisis.
Periphery and centers in the climate crisis
Such ideas of a capitalist „Green New Deal“ are, by the way, almost only conceivable in Germany or other center countries like the USA, which are not yet in a dramatic financial situation due to their export surpluses (Germany) or control over the world reserve currency (US). In the southern European countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain or Portugal, which are burdened by debt and often teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, there is hardly any talk of a „Green Deal,“ although these countries would actually be predestined for such an energetic transformation because of the climatic conditions.
If the centers of the world system are already hardly in a position to rapidly reduce CO2 emissions, this is completely illusory in the periphery and the most ‚emerging economiesâ€, which account for the majority of the global increase in emissions. It is sheer ecological madness to push for the capitalist modernization of the emerging countries11 – and at the same time, it is out of the question for the public in the western centers of capitalism to dispute the emerging countries‘ right to try catch up economically. Within the capitalist logic, in which the climate discourse still largely proceeds, the only options – apart from the usual greenwashing – are to deny the emerging countries any right to modernization, or to ignore climate change in relation to the emerging countries by neatly separating the corresponding public discourses.
A sustainable development of the periphery of the world system, a global equalization of living conditions, would only be conceivable beyond capital – in a post-capitalist world system, where the conscious shaping of reproduction by the society itself would no longer have to obey the „markets“ running amok, but would focus on the global fight against the late effects of the capitalist climate crisis.
A Matter of survival: Alternatives to capitalism
This insanity of an economy based on growth compulsion could only be maintained over the period since industrialization thanks to the abundance of fossil energy sources. This is, historically speaking, a relatively short period. It was the enormous energy density, first of coal and then, from the middle of the 20th century on, of oil, that made this blind growth dynamic possible, which devastates all regions of the world and all areas of life.
The solar energy of millions of years was stored in the fossil energy sources, and the capital dynamics burned them irretrievably in a geological blink of an eye, in order to maintain an irrational, insane end in itself as long as possible: that money becomes more money. With the burning out of this fossil exploitation machine, the capitalist growth compulsion also loses the energetic basis for further expansion – an ecological, post-capitalist society, which would have to be oriented towards the greatest possible conservation of resources and the satisfaction of at least the elementary needs of all people, is only conceivable beyond this blind growth compulsion resulting from capital accumulation.
Moreover, the material and technical conditions for an ecological turnaround have long been in place. The enormous productivity potential, which only further accelerates environmental destruction within the framework of the capitalist mode of production, could contribute to the establishment of a sustainable economy beyond the capital relationship. Only when social reproduction is no longer subordinated to the end in itself of capital valorization, but directly serves the satisfaction of human needs, can an ecologically sustainable mode of economy be established.
The struggle against the impending ecological collapse is thus not about a reactionary anti-productivism, a return to pre-modern modes of production. Rather, the productive potentials and technical possibilities that capitalism has produced would have to be used in a tremendous transformational process to build a sustainable social formation. The advances in productivity that currently only accelerate the capitalist burning of global resources would then actually enable their conservation. What is ultimately at stake – in connection with the struggle against the climate crisis – is the liberation of the productive forces from the shackles of the capitalist mode of production.
The overcoming of the capital relationship, which is running amok in its agony, thus represents a question of survival for human civilization. Hence, the ecological movement would have to appeal not so much to people’s morals, but to their collective survival instincts. It would be more a matter of questioning the capitalist way of life and production and making its madness obvious, and not of focusing on moralizing appeals.
Hurricane Milton made landfall yesterday evening as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, Florida. Before the hurricane hit, thirty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen counties in the state, putting about 1.26 million people under a tornado advisory. With the hurricane came high winds and water, including ten to twenty inches of rain in the Tampa area. And, although it was not the worst-case scenario people feared, eleven people are dead and about three million are without power because of the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been on the ground since before the storm hit.
In election news, today, The Atlantic endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. This is only the fifth time since its founding in 1857 that The Atlantic has endorsed a presidential candidate. It is the third time it has endorsed Trump’s opponent. It also endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 when he ran against extremist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. And in 1860 it endorsed Abraham Lincoln.
The Atlantic’s endorsement of Harris echoes its earlier endorsement of Lincoln, not only in its thorough dislike of Trump as “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history”—an echo of its 1860 warning that this election “is a turning-point in our history”—but because both endorsements show a new press challenging an older system.
In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes.
With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris today accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.
Indeed, Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. And yet, Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving similar criticism. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve.
In a piece today, Matt Gertz of the media watchdog Media Matters reports that five major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—produced nearly four times as many articles about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the week after then–FBI director James Comey announced new developments in the story than they did about the unsealing of a new filing in Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection earlier this month.
“None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server,” Gertz wrote. “Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server [than] they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.” “The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve,” Gertz wrote, “resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.”
On Tuesday, October 8, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter of the Columbia Journalism Review outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. (Just today, he threatened CBS and “all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”)
Bassin and Potter note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”
And yet, in the past in the U.S., when the media has appeared to become captive to established interests, new media have begun to give a voice to the opposition. In the 1850s, when elite enslavers stopped the circulation of newspapers and books calling for abolition, they prompted an explosion of new media that expressed the sentiments of those opposed to the expansion of human enslavement. Editor Horace Greeley led the way with the New-York Tribune in the 1840s. He was keenly aware of the importance of the new press and, as an early convert to the Republican Party, led his paper to become the anchor of a string of new Republican newspapers across the North—including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times—that spread the party’s ideology.
The Atlantic Monthly’s endorsement of Lincoln in 1860 was part of that movement, and poet James Russell Lowell, who wrote the endorsement, mocked the idea that the press should avoid causing trouble. “We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents’ messages, and congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union…. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think.”
Harris has nodded to established media, but as Berlatsky points out, there is very little payoff for her in focusing on those venues, since those audiences are generally already quite attuned to politics and are looking for new developments and scandals. In contrast, winning in 2024 means turning out new voters by finding new venues that offer them a political voice. Harris has recognized that media shift by focusing her media appearances on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, radio shows like Howard Stern’s, and television shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View.
Campaign staffer Victor Shi noted that, based on averages, Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy reached 5 million people, The View, 2.45 million; Howard Stern, 10 million; and Stephen Colbert, 3.2 million—in all, 25 million or more people that traditional media do not reach. (Shi also called attention to the fact that on October 9, the campaign live streamed an Arizona rally by Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on the World of Warcraft Twitch stream.)
The Atlantic nodded to the free thought on which the magazine was founded in 1857 when it came out strongly for Harris today. It is endorsing Harris, it said, because she “respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.
Never could figure out why you do this.
Before speaking at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh, the former president spoke directly to Black male voters in an effort to bolster flagging support.
