Some truths

Honestly, I’ve always been skeptical about reincarnation, but 2025 has proven me wrong.

It appears that Tammy Faye Bakker, Joseph Goebbels and Veruca Salt have all come back:

John McCain used to say that if you lived long enough, anything is possible in America. He was definitely on to something.

Margaret Sullivan is the former public editor of The New York Times, who now writes the excellent American Crisis. She recently drew a most curious rebuke from Elon, who objected to something Ms. Sullivan wrote, which referenced the creed of the muckraker:

Journalism is supposed to ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Sullivan was writing in the context of the Bari Weiss decision to spike a story about the torture, human rights abuses and cruelty practiced at an El Salvadoran gulag/concentration camp, to which the United States has sold human beings in the style of the SS.

Here was Elon’s response:

No, Marge, you’re supposed to tell the truth.

Here’s a truth, and it’s evidence-based:

The antisemitism of Musk has become integral to the MAGA coalition. It is a coagulant that binds the hate and animates so much of the energy that is seething inside of MAGA, of which Bari Weiss is a fellow traveller.

Neither of them are free speech advocates. The notion that they are believers in a free press is absurd.

Both of their records speak for themselves. In the case of Bari Weiss, there is even a mystical component involved, given she created The Free Press on the back of activism demanding the censor of viewpoints she doesn’t approve of from people she doesn’t like.

Here is how the media reporter Parker Molloy put it in The New Republic:

But Weiss’s commitment to free speech has always been selective. Her career didn’t start with defending controversial voices; it started with trying to get people fired for expressing the wrong opinions about Israel.

As a student at Columbia University in the mid-2000s, Weiss co-founded a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom, which targeted Arab and Muslim professors in the Middle East studies department. The campaign, which grew out of a documentary called “Columbia Unbecoming,” accused professors like Joseph Massad of intimidating Jewish and pro-Israel students. As Glenn Greenwald documented in a 2017 article for The Intercept, the New York Civil Liberties Union condemned the effort as a “witch hunt designed to punish Israel critics.” Columbia conducted an investigation and found the allegations largely baseless.

In a follow-up piece at The Intercept in 2018, Greenwald described the activism Weiss helped lead as “designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying.” Several of the targeted professors lacked tenure at the time, meaning they were vulnerable to exactly the kind of pressure Weiss’s group applied.

This wasn’t a one-time thing. Weiss also participated in a campaign against Nadia Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist at Barnard who had written a scholarly book examining the archaeological claims underlying Israeli territorial claims. Despite Abu El-Haj’s academic credentials and the awards her book had received, an online petition emerged demanding she be denied tenure. Weiss wrote a column attacking Abu El-Haj’s scholarship in Haaretz.

Lest there be any confusion over whether Weiss has evolved over recent years, Malloy uses the time machine to peer into 2019:

And as recently as 2019, Weiss was still at it. When Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley was invited to speak at Stanford, a law student wrote an op-ed comparing Valley’s satirical work to Nazi propaganda and calling for his talk to be canceled. Weiss amplified the piece on Twitter, thanking the author and endorsing his characterization of Valley’s art as “hatred that gloms onto Jews and the Jewish State.” Valley, who had drawn satirical cartoons critical of right-wing Jewish figures and Israeli policies, responded that Weiss’s intervention forced Stanford to move his presentation to a closed venue with security due to safety concerns. As I wrote at Media Matters at the time, this was “precisely the kind of campus controversy” that Weiss would have decried if the politics were reversed: a student group trying to intimidate a speaker out of appearing on campus. Instead, she sided with those doing the intimidating.

Stephen Miller has demanded that CBS fire the journalists who have objected to Bari Weiss’s censoring of a fully vetted and horrifying story that shined a light on the cruelty of the United States government.

Of course that can’t happen because any firings would trigger wrongful termination suits, which would beget discovery, which would uncover the contacts between the Ellison boy and his censorious handmaid over a very short time span between Friday, December 19 and Sunday afternoon on December 21. Discovery would also uncover all of the phone calls that raged between the White House and Weiss, and Weiss and the boy, and so on and so forth.

Nobody is getting fired at CBS because the firing will prove that Weiss did what everyone knows she did.

For the record, here is the official timeline of events from Parker Malloy:

On Friday morning, CBS sent out a press release promoting the upcoming segment. “Inside CECOT,” it was called. The network described it as a look at “one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons,” featuring interviews with recently released deportees who would describe “the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.” CBS ran promotional clips on the air and on social media. The 60 Minutes website had a page up for the segment.

On Friday night, Donald Trump held a rally in North Carolina. He complained about 60 Minutes, saying the program had “treated me worse under the new ownership” and that if the Ellisons, who now control CBS’s parent company, “are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

On Saturday morning, Weiss weighed in with concerns about the segment. According to CNN’s reporting, she took issue with the lack of an on-camera response from the Trump administration. She suggested the segment needed an interview with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and provided his contact information to 60 Minutes staff.

By Sunday afternoon, the story was dead.

When Donald said that he was being treated “far worse” by the Ellisons since taking over CBS, and they were even worse than his enemies, it was a threat. It was a signal that a deal that was coming together was going to fall apart because Donald felt the rules had been broken.

He’s the boss and you don’t go against the boss from Queens. It is never, ever okay to refuse the friendship of Donald Trump, who will take care of you for the price of loving him enough. It is a two-way street as MTG discovered when she crossed Trump’s friends and the implicit understandings of how things work. Greene said she told Trump that she didn’t understand his intransigence about the release of the Epstein files. She claims that he said:

My friends will get hurt.

Let’s go back to Parker Malloy to detail the friendship at stake.

Larry Ellison, David’s father and the co-founder of Oracle, has been a Trump supporter for years. He’s currently worth around $250 billion, making him one of the richest people on the planet.

He personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to back the Warner Bros. Discovery bid. The Ellisons need this deal to happen, and they need Trump’s regulators to let it happen.

Trump has not been shy about the relationship.

“They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine,” [emphasis added] he said in October, after the Paramount-Skydance merger went through. “And they’ll do the right thing.”

What does “the right thing” mean when you’re building a media empire that depends on government approval? We might have just seen it. Trump complained about “60 Minutes” on Friday.

By Sunday, the critical story was dead.

That’s the truth.

The story was killed because it was bad for Trump.

Here’s another truth:

The Epstein files have been suppressed because they are bad for Trump.

Here’s another truth:

The Charlie Kirk memorial service in Phoenix was a fascist rally where Stephen Miller threatened millions of Americans in the language of the Nazi propaganda minister. It was a hatefest. It was also the opening act to the most disgusting grift of the entire Trump era, which is the abomination of Erika Kirk costumed from head to toe in the attire of a Vegas lounge singer tossing merchandise to a crowd of disordered children, while standing in a replica of the tent in which her husband and father of her two children was blown away.

Here’s another truth:

These masked agents are American Gestapo. Literally. Do you know what is Gestapo abbreviated in German? Secret State Police.

Here’s another truth:

The White House was torn down by Trump.

Here’s another truth:

Donald Trump wrecked the American economy in nine months.

Here’s another truth:

His family and associates have engaged in millions of dollars worth of graft, fraud and corruption. His sons, Uday and Qusay, and the daughter he has repeatedly sexualized, have made hundreds of millions of dollars illegitimately and illegally over 2025.

Here’s another truth:

Donald Trump has stopped zero wars, but is on the verge of starting one in South America.

Here’s another truth:

Donald Trump is sick.

Here’s another truth:

2026 will be worse than 2025 in America.

Here’s another truth:

As things get worse and more dangerous in America Bari Weiss will be up on that wall making sure that you are as misinformed as possible in the service of Donald Trump’s friends, who need his friendship.

Here are some last truths of the day:

Elon Musk is a fascist and a mentally ill drug addict.

Ericka Kirk is a supernatural grifter.

Stephen Miller is a Nazi.

The Ellison boy is America’s most spoiled mediocrity.

Bari Weiss is a propagandist and a bought and paid for red pen censor, who manages the boy’s social standing.

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