Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Newspapers shouldn’t be in the business of endorsing political candidates.

Yes, I think Democrats are complicit in genocide. But Trump would be far worse
Wajahat Ali

There is simply no moral argument for allowing the former president to win in the name of opposing genocide

If you’re undecided about your vote, a reliable rule of thumb is to always side against the candidate who is a convicted criminal, admires “good things” done by Adolf Hitler, and is labeled a “fascist” by four-star generals who worked in their administration.

However, just days before the chaotic 2024 US election, many American voters are still loathe to vote for Kamala Harris due to the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. It’s hard to blame them. “How can we vote for genocidaires?” ask many Democratic voters radicalized and infuriated by Israel’s daily war crimes. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu’s fanatical government, populated by a rogue galley of Jewish supremacists, openly declared their desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and illegally occupy more land. Their desire for ultra-violence and carnage does not spare journalists, UN workers, doctors or even US citizens. More than 42,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed.

And yet Democrats couldn’t be bothered to even invite one Palestinian as a speaker at the Democratic national convention. Instead, they were replaced by hollow talking points about the need for a ceasefire, return of hostages, and Palestinian self-determination even as the Israeli prime minister’s policies make such goals an impossibility. However, Netanyahu’s humiliation and repudiation of the US, Israel’s greatest ally, is still rewarded with billions of aid and unconditional support.

Despite these tragic, deflating, and heartbreaking circumstances, progressive voters must still support the vice-president in the 2024 election. The reality is that only one of two candidates will be the next president and the most powerful person on Earth. It will be either Donald Trump, a twice-impeached vulgarian who incited a violent insurrection, or Harris. Whenever I say this to undecided friends, they accuse me of supporting genocide or believe “both sides” are the same evil.

I respectfully disagree.

Donald Trump will be genocidal and a fascist. On Gaza, Trump promised he would let Israel “finish the job”. That means fulfilling his mega-donor Miriam Adelson’s wish of annexing the West Bank and standing pat as Israel moves to occupy northern Gaza on the graveyard of Palestinians. There’s a reason why Israel’s extremist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wants Trump to win and says he will be better for Israel. Trump might be better for Israel, but he won’t be better for Jewish people, whom he said he would blame if he loses the 2024 election. This is an addition to his promotion of antisemitic “dual loyalty” tropes and support of the antisemitic “great replacement theory”.

Trump loathes Palestinians even more. He said Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, has “become like a Palestinian” and “a proud member of Hamas” for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump has also promised to bar Palestinian refugees and implement an “ideological test” for Muslim immigrants if re-elected. At Trump’s Nazi cosplay rally at Madison Square Garden, Rudy Giuliani said Palestinians “are taught to kill us at two years old” and added: “They may have good people, I’m sorry, [but] I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two.” Afterward, Trump appeared on stage and declared the GOP is “the party of inclusion”. Unless you’re Palestinian, an undocumented person, Haitian, Puerto Rican, a woman, or a Jewish liberal.

Still, some jaded American voters don’t believe anything will be different when it comes to US policy in Gaza. I don’t blame them. But, if you remain unmoved on that issue, then I’d kindly ask you to turn to the domestic front where in the final month of his campaign Trump has promised to unleash the military and national guard on US citizens and invoke the Alien Sedition Act against migrants. This is the same man who said he’d be a “dictator for a day” and whose Project 2025 is like a helpful Bond villain blueprint that explicitly details the authoritarian ambitions for a white Christian nationalist utopia. The agenda includes replacing public servants with Maga brownshirts, weaponizing the justice department against his numerous enemies – which includes Liz Cheney, for whom he wants televised public military tribunals – and eliminating the Department of Education.

“Well, we already survived the first Trump administration. The system will hold. This is just scare-mongering,” I am told in response. This statement is rooted in privilege and amnesia. I’d recommend people who believe this fiction to talk to the family members of nearly half a million Americans who died during the pandemic, a disaster made infinitely worse due to Trump’s incompetence and lies to the US public. I want people to talk to low-income and middle-class families who rely on Obamacare for survival, which Trump and the GOP have promised to eliminate and replace with a “concept of a plan”. I’d like people to read the story of Amber Nicole Thurman, a young Black woman who died in Georgia because she was denied access to a legal abortion thanks to Trump and his extremist, rightwing supreme court majority that overturned Roe v Wade.

There’s too much at stake and far too many communities, both in the United States and abroad, that will suffer if Trump is re-elected. The desire to “punish” Joe Biden and Harris for Gaza and vote instead for Trump or a third party vote, which just helps Trump in swing states, is like punching ourselves in the face. The entire country will end up with a bloody nose as Trump becomes a dictator and unleashes his Maga brownshirts.

With Harris and Democrats, there is an opening for Americans to organize, push, and pressure her administration to halt Israel’s genocide and pursue progressive healthcare and economic policies. Democratic allies include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, labor organizations, and communities of color who remain committed to social justice, equity and peace. With the Republicans and Trump, no such allies exist. There’s simply a fascist and a white Christian nationalist regime in waiting.

There’s no both sides. Please vote accordingly.

Wajahat Ali is editor of The Left Hook substack, co-host of The Democracy-ish Podcast, and author of the book Go Back to Where You Came From and Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

Correct journalistic practice is one thing. Saving liberal democracy, however, is quite another and must be supported by all possible means.
Because after its abolition, there will no longer be a free press.

A journalists’ job is to present the news.

(...)

There’s no point at which a society takes collapse seriously.

None.

Look at America today. There’s Kamala warning that Trump’s a fascist. That’s after his own Chief of Staff did, and that’s after his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did. There are countless pundits and columnists and whatnot who’ve finally—a decade late—finally become aware how grave the situation is, and have begun to repeat the mantra.

And guess what? Nobody cares.

(...)

In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.

Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.

At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.

As thousands of angry Times readers canceled their subscriptions, Soon-Shiong publicly claimed on X to have asked the editorial board to write an analysis of “all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” during their respective White House tenures. But he said the board “chose to remain silent.”

Nonsense. We made no such choice. We were ready to endorse Harris, and Soon-Shiong’s post on X was the first time I or my fellow editorial writers had heard anything about a side-by-side analysis. Having been so casually thrown under the bus, I resigned Thursday. My colleague Karin Klein also announced that she would step down.

On Friday, the Post publisher and CEO, William Lewis, published a statement that his paper, too, would not endorse in the presidential race, now or ever again. A member of the Post editorial board resigned. Subscribers canceled.

Remember, this is the same news organization that, during the first Trump administration, adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also die in broad daylight. In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office, demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.

Lewis and Soon-Shiong both explained that they wanted to let voters make their own decisions.

I hear some version of that irritating statement every four years, although it typically comes from readers who ask why editorial boards don’t just deliver the facts, the way news stories are supposed to, leaving judgment up to readers. Publishers and newspaper owners ought to know better.

Editorials express a newspaper’s institutional viewpoint, based on a clearly articulated set of values and expressed by logical (and sometimes emotional) arguments supported by evidence. In a process unique in journalism, they are shaped by daily back-and-forth discussions among editorial writers. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom, where reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves.

Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.

The Times editorial board went more than three decades without endorsing in presidential races, largely because readers and the newsroom were so outraged by the endorsement of Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972 that publishers were too cautious (or rather, too chicken) to again take a stand. But soon after I arrived at the Times, the editorial board promised to start endorsing for president again in the 2008 primary. We argued—in an editorial, of course—that if we purported to support transparency, voter engagement, and civic participation, then we had an obligation to make a decision and vigorously defend our choice.

In a pre-endorsement series of editorials, we invited readers to examine a set of foundational ideas such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” and to question how those and other principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to current challenges. Then we measured the primary candidates against those values, and made our case for the relatively unknown Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that editorials don’t change anyone’s vote, but that’s not the point. Even voters who already have made up their mind often look for a well-reasoned explanation of why their choice is the right one. And let’s not be so certain that a strong argument on an editorial page, even one from California or the District of Columbia, won’t affect the outcome of a close race that could be won or lost by just a few votes in one precinct in Pennsylvania.

Soon-Shiong’s alternative, a non-choice pro-and-con matrix, wouldn’t be an editorial. It would be as if an attorney decided not to bother with a closing argument and said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are some reasons you should rule for my client, and also a bunch of reasons to rule against him.” Nor does the proposed side-by-side analysis of Trump’s and Harris’s policies make much sense on its own terms. Trump as president was the top policy maker during his time in office. Harris, as vice president, has not been a policy maker at all, so the comparison would be inapt. An editorial board would identify that flaw immediately. Soon-Shiong may have missed it, but I find myself wondering whether he wanted to direct the outcome of the endorsement.

In short-circuiting the Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong’s message has become only more incoherent. He said Thursday that his goal was to avoid political division. But his adult daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said in a series of X posts and in a Saturday New York Times story that the family met and collectively decided against endorsing Harris to protest the vice president’s support for Israel. Not true, Patrick Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion,” but not for the Times, he said.

Instead of a forthright, well-argued editorial, readers are left with an indecipherable message and journalistic failure. Someone ought to write about it. It might make a good editorial.

Umair Haque wrote:

(...)

There’s no point at which a society takes collapse seriously.

None.

Look at America today. There’s Kamala warning that Trump’s a fascist. That’s after his own Chief of Staff did, and that’s after his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did. There are countless pundits and columnists and whatnot who’ve finally—a decade late—finally become aware how grave the situation is, and have begun to repeat the mantra.

And guess what? Nobody cares.

(...)

theissue

Newspapers shouldn’t be in the business of endorsing political candidates.