Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025)

There’s no writer I love more than Arundhati Roy, who sprang onto the world stage in 1997 with her runaway best-seller The God of Small Things. Roy’s latest book is as much a memoir as it is an ode to her volatile mother, a revolutionary school principal she calls “my gangster.” Mother Mary is also an homage to India’s untamed spaces, which sheltered and educated Roy when she fled home as a teenager. Many twists and turns later, Roy found herself a literary star. Rather than rest on her laurels, however, she used her newfound pedestal to call out India’s increasing Hindu extremism — a risky move that came at a personal cost. “I hadn’t just avoided the gilded cage. I had blown it to smithereens,” Roy writes. “In the process, like a suicide bomber, I had blown myself to smithereens, too. My life. My home. My love.” To understand how Roy grew into such a fierce writer and activist, you need to read this rollicking book.

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013)

History has been too kind to the Dulles brothers. Dulles airport, most notably, is named after John Foster Dulles, a religious scold who was partial to Nazis and served as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, while his womanizing younger brother Allen Dulles helmed the CIA. “This created a nexus of power unmatched in American history,” writes author Stephen Kinzer. The CIA, in the words of Allen, is “the State Department for bad countries.” By “bad,” Allen and his brother meant any country threatening the profits of their law firm, the mighty Sullivan and Cromwell. Once in office the brothers wasted no time in dispatching with their firm’s nemeses, overthrowing in quick succession Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, followed by Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz the next year. Amid a burgeoning Cold War, which the Dulles brothers craved and fueled, the duo expanded their regime-change remit to leaders they believed threatened America and capitalism more broadly: Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, among other luminaries of the non-aligned movement. It’s disturbing to think how many deaths the brothers caused, and how many of today’s problems can be traced back to their handiwork (including the Iran War).

Washington Is Burning: Corruption and Lies in the Age of Trump (2026)

While Andrew Cockburn, DC editor of Harper’s Magazine, has a lethal pen, his ancestor makes him look quaint. Sir George Cockburn, as an admiral in the Royal Navy during the War of 1812, led an amphibious assault on DC that resulted in the capture and burning of the White House, Capitol and more. His attack “would have been absolutely impossible without first-class intelligence operatives to alert his raiding parties to enemy forces and guide them around the tortuous shoreline,” writes his descendant. “Fortunately, volunteers for such a mission soon appeared: slaves.” Over two centuries later, another assault on the capital is under way, this one by the US president himself. Donald Trump’s corruption, and Democrats’ feckless years-long response, form the basis for the searing essays in Washington Is Burning. Other topics include the risks of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power, how Monsanto helped fuel the war on invasive species, and runaway Pentagon spending. “Every time the US military withdraws from the field of martial combat, commentators opine that the occasion might be marked by a respite from gargantuan defense budgets,” writes Cockburn. But since the Korean War, the overall budget “has grown at a steady rate of 5 percent a year. Every time the number has sunk below that trend, a fearsome ‘threat’ has appeared right on cue to justify remedial action.”

PS — If I’d written this post a week from now, I may well have added a fourth book, which I’m currently reading. Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s book, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, makes Mexican history jump off the page (and makes me realize how little of it I know).

Published at Counterpunch

There are lots of things to call JD Vance, but president isn’t one of them, at least not yet. While I’d like to keep it that way, Democrats seem determined to hand Vance the presidency in 2028 by enabling him to run as the antiwar candidate. Both Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s unlikely wins demonstrate just how desirable a lane that is to occupy. (That neither Trump nor Obama governed as antiwar is another matter.)

At first blush it seems implausible that Vance could claim the antiwar mantle. After all he’s vice president to Trump, who promised to end wars and put “America first,” only to drown those promises in the Strait of Hormuz by initiating another Middle East war of choice. That Trump did this at the behest of a foreign nation, Israel, is all the more humiliating. The result is Americans paying $4 for gas and untold Iranian suffering.

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And this isn’t the only war Trump has kept his vice president (and the rest of us) in. Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, albeit at more of a simmer, and therefore out of headlines. There’s also Israel’s occupation of swaths of neighboring Lebanon and Syria, blatant crimes enabled by the US’s continued backing of Israel.

Then there’s the Ukraine War. Trump promised to end it on “day one,” yet it’s smoldering on into its fifth year, leaving Russia damaged and Ukraine all but destroyed. (In 1991 Ukraine boasted 52 million residents, but now has less than half that number, a population decline with little precedent and little hope of reversing as long as the war grinds on.)

In short, as Trump’s number two, Vance should be anything but the antiwar candidate in 2028. Democrats, however, seem determined to cede him the political high ground anyway.

After all, which top Democrats want to end these wars? Sure, they make vague statements about peace, but when the rubber meets the road, Democrats opt for more war time and again. Whenever Trump is on the verge of exiting the Iran War, for example, Democrats decry his would-be “surrender” like clockwork, which boxes Trump into staying the course and helps ensure Iran becomes yet another forever war (one that top Democrats low-key wanted in the first place).

And anytime Trump talks to Putin—a prerequisite for ending the Ukraine War—Democrats get up in arms.

Meanwhile when it comes to Israel—despite Democratic primary voters making clear their opposition to the country’s belligerence—has any top Democrat put Israel in its place quite like Vance?

“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” so think twice before “attacking the only powerful ally” you have left, Vance warned Israeli critics of Trump’s tentative Iran deal in June, including members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet. “Two-thirds” of your recent weapons, Vance added, have been “paid for by American taxpayers.”

Similarly when it comes to Ukraine, Vance has been more aggressive than Democrats at trying to end the conflict, even going so far as to scold Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office last year—an embarrassment for sure, but not as embarrassing as continuing a forever war with the potential to go nuclear.

Vance has also been establishing his antiwar bona fides through the Iran War, with his allies leaking to the press that he warned Trump against the conflict. In subsequent months, Vance has led negotiations with Iran.

Meanwhile, one of Vance’s chief boosters, Tucker Carlson, who publicly broke with Trump over the Iran War, told Bloomberg last month, “If Vance were president, we would not be at a war with Iran.” Carlson, the Fox News host turned podcaster, claims he’s considering starting a third party, but my guess is he’s actually looking to demonstrate there’s an appetite for an antiwar Republican candidate in 2028, specifically one named Vance.

Vance’s march to the White House—one likely to be financed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other tech oligarchs—is far from inevitable. The surest way for Democrats to undercut Vance’s antiwar cred is by drawing a clear line in the sand. But that would require Democrats to actually oppose wars, and even work with Trump to end them.

Among likely 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Ro Khanna has best exemplified this approach by criticizing Trump for starting the Iran War while maintaining a willingness to support Trump’s (sporadic) efforts to end it. “Americans are tired of these wars. They don’t want wars in the Middle East. They don’t want to be dragged in,” Khanna told Fox Business in June. “They want diplomacy. Diplomacy actually is better than these wars.”

Khanna further brandished his antiwar credentials by visiting Palestinians in the West Bank last month. The trip drew international headlines when the California congressman was detained by armed Israeli settlers.

Will other Democrats, including other 2028 presidential hopefuls, step out in similar ways? Doing so may be the only way to stop Vance from following in Trump’s and Obama’s footsteps by riding antiwar sentiment into the White House.

O’Neal, you may recall, was the focus of a story I wrote for FAIR last month that looked at his year atop the Post’s Opinions section. I shared how O’Neal used his influential perch to shamelessly advance Post owner Jeff Bezos’ interests, including by going easy on President Trump, who controls the federal money spigot that Bezos needs to expand his empire on earth and in space. (Bezos’ wooing of Trump has paid off in spades.)

Knowing that O’Neal had pleased his billionaire boss, I assumed he’d have his job for years if not decades to come. And the 34-year-old apparently felt similarly, telling colleagues his Post position was likely be his last job in journalism, according to the media industry newsletter Status. Yet on July 31, O’Neal suddenly announced he was stepping down, telling Opinions staffers at an all-hands meeting that he was doing so for personal family reasons.

It is certainly possible that O’Neal is leaving for the reason he gave, and if that’s the case, I wish him the best.

It’s also possible there’s another explanation for why he’s stepping down—Status noted that department budgets are presently coming due, which is a time when spending gets put under a microscope and pencils sharpened.

While the Post has been busy slashing costs (and jobs), former publisher Will Lewis gave O’Neal a freer hand to spend, but not always to great effect. For example, Opinions’ new flagship podcast, titled “Make It Make Sense,” was widely panned and barely viewed. And in his memo to the Opinions team about his departure—titled “A Remarkable Year”—O’Neal notably omitted mention of the podcast.

Lewis, for his part, was forced to resign as publisher in February. He’s been replaced on an acting basis by Jeff D’Onofrio, whose background isn’t in journalism but number-crunching for companies like Tumblr and Zagat, the restaurant guide. It’s certainly possible that O’Neal’s desire to continue his expansive remake of Opinions ran headfirst into D’Onofrio’s sharpened pencil.

Regardless of the reason, O’Neal’s exit is a stunning development. It’s also unlikely to change the direction Bezos and O’Neal have set for Opinions, at least not if O’Neal is succeeded by his handpicked deputy, James Hohmann, as several Posties believe is likely. That’s again according to the reporting of Status’ Natalie Korach, whose August 2 story on O’Neal’s departure began:

In the days leading up to his shocking exit last week, Adam O’Neal gave no indication he was on his way out as the Washington Post’s Opinion editor. In recent private conversations, Status has learned, he struck precisely the opposite tone, sounding triumphant and boasting that he had pushed the paper’s storied opinion section further to the right. People who spoke with O’Neal told Status he appeared energized by his work at the newspaper and were stunned when he abruptly announced his departure.

O’Neal’s last day will be August 31, he informed staff. His tenure is less than half that of his predecessor, David Shipley, who resigned last year after Bezos declared—a month into Trump’s second term—that Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets” every day, while leaving it to others to publish “viewpoints opposing those pillars.”

As I noted for FAIR:

While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation…

Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”

D’Onofrio has his work cut out for him in replacing O’Neal. It’s hard to imagine anyone more “genuinely enthusiastic” than O’Neal, who compensated for his lack of experience with a desperation to please Bezos, which may be the Opinions chief’s top task.

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Published at Counterpunch

Life is strange.

If you’d told me fifteen years ago that, as part of covering DC politics, I’d be reading books about space, I’d have told you to take a hike. But when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he set a chain of events in motion.

I remember the day the Post’s sale was announced. It was August 2013 and I was with my friend Tony Norman at our regular falafel haunt on U Street when I got an alert on my phone saying Bezos had just bought the Post for $250 million. “What?” Tony said when I broke the news to him. I read it again, not believing the words either. The Graham family, which had owned the Post for decades, wasn’t known to be looking to sell its prized possession. But now they had.

And in that instant, Bezos was transformed from the billionaire founder of Amazon, into the savior of the Post, if not the entire failing media industry. I read these hot takes with steam coming out of my ears. As the child of parents who owned our local newspaper, I was keenly aware of Amazon’s role in destroying newspapers across the country — namely by bankrupting local business, which are the lifeblood of any local paper (and community). The man who may be responsible for destroying more newspapers than anyone on earth was definitely not a savior of the free press.

That much I knew. But there was a lot about Bezos that I didn’t know. And now that he owned the Post, then the all-important newspaper for local DC politics, it was time to start reading up on the man.

The first book I cracked was The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s revelatory 2013 biography of Bezos. Eight years later, Stone followed that up with Amazon Unbound, another invaluable work. More recently, I devoured Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli’s excellent 2024 book The Everything War. These books laid bare Bezos’ business practices, a good number of which are illegal, or would be if we enforced antitrust laws in this country.

But there’s another aspect to Bezos that these books didn’t quite capture — namely how he’s lost touch with reality.

Bezos truly believes that he’s going to save humanity via an intergalactic bank shot. He’s perfectly open about this, and always has been. As I wrote in a story at Truthdig last year:

Jeff Bezos has long believed that he can save humanity, but only by placing earth’s heavy industries on the moon, then shipping manufactured products back to earth, and leaving the pollution behind.

“The earth is finite,” a teenaged Bezos told his local newspaper, “and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.”

“I still believe that,” Bezos said four decades later, while doing his best Steve Jobs impersonation on a darkened stage at the DC Convention Center, with a captive audience of students looking on.

With population and energy use growing exponentially, we’re on a “bad path” that leads to “rationing,” Bezos explained. But not to worry! With all the fervor of a snake oil salesman, Bezos continued: “The good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes we have unlimited resources. So we get to choose: do we want stasis and rationing? Or do we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice.”

“We can have a trillion humans in the solar system,” Bezos said in his 2019 presentation. “Which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.”

I don’t begrudge Bezos a rich fantasy life. But this isn’t fantasy for him, it’s very real. It’s also very convenient.

Bezos’ curious beliefs happen to align perfectly with his business interests (like AI), which trash the planet. (Job well done on that front; as I write these words, Canada’s forests are burning with such ferocity that it’s unpleasant to breathe a thousand miles away in the DC region.) By pretending we’re oh-so close to finding a miracle space solution for our ills, it obviates the need to rein in polluters like Amazon, or address other earthly injustices — it gives tech bros a free pass for their earthly sins.

“This is painfully apparent in the way Jeff Bezos talks about geniuses of the future,” science journalist Adam Becker wrote in his incisive 2025 book More Everything Forever.

He dreams of one thousand Mozarts and one thousand Einsteins among his trillion humans living in space. But he’s neglecting the potential Einsteins and Mozarts that are living and dying in poverty right now. If Bezos really wants a dynamic civilization, he could invest in solving the problems that we actually face. He could tackle the enormous levels of wealth inequality in the world today. He could put all his resources into fighting global warming, which will also have unequal impacts around the world. Instead, he’s going to space — and he thinks that’s the best and most important thing he can do with his money.

This worldview comes down to “Don’t look at the horrifying labor conditions at the local Amazon fulfillment center,” writes Becker. “Look at the shiny rocket instead. Ignore the problems of this world. Everything will be better in space.”

This belief system — let’s call it “the grass is always greener on the other side of the galaxy” — not only benefits Bezos, but other tech oligarchs, too. So it should come as no surprise that they’re also hopped up on some variation of this self-serving ideology.

One central aspect of this thinking is something ironically called “effective altruism.” One might look at those two words and wonder what exactly the problem is. Altruism is a good thing. And if it’s effective all the better. But somehow the resulting worldview embodies the opposite of these words’ meaning.

I grew up in the “greed is good” eighties and nineties in Westchester County, New York. While I found that worldview debased, at least it acknowledged its unbridled selfishness. What effective altruism manages to do — all under the guise of selflessness — is elevate greed from good to practically godly.

Under this ethical rubric, particularly the “longtermism” strain of it, tech bros needn’t fret over aiding the needy of today, because their brilliance will do infinitely more good by elevating the lives of billions or even trillions of future humans.

“Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better,” William MacAskill, co-founder of the effective altruism movement, wrote in his 2022 book What We Owe the Future. “Distance in time is like distance in space. People matter even if they live thousands of miles away. Likewise, they matter even if they live thousands of years hence.” (MacAskill’s book was awkwardly published just as the leading proponent of effective altruism, MacAskill’s friend and patron Sam Bankman-Fried, was charged with running a crypto Ponzi scheme; he’s now serving a 25-year prison sentence.)

It’s easy to see why tech billionaires love effective altruism. They’re ignoring today’s downtrodden not out of sinful greed, but to heed a higher, god-like calling. And devoting their unprecedented wealth to whatever strikes their fancy — often shooting phallic rockets into space — only demonstrates their munificence to future generations.

“These ideas offer transcendence,” writes Becker, “allowing adherents to feel they can safely ignore all limitations. Go to space, and you can ignore scarcity of resources, not to mention legal restrictions.”

When Bezos bought the Post in 2013, I suspected things would change, and not for the better. But I had no idea the journey would veer into space, where tech billionaires go to make greed godly.

Reading Becker’s book, a quote from the late inimitable Texas columnist Molly Ivins came to mind. After dining with her state’s oil tycoons at the Midland Petroleum Club, she came away thinking, “Goddamn, those are nice people. I’m sure glad they’re not running the world.”

Today’s tech billionaires are running the world, and increasingly space too. And they’re using promises of the latter to strengthen their grip on the former, all in the name of serving humanity.

It’s been an eventful year since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Adam O’Neal for the prestigious job of Post Opinions editor. O’Neal was an unusual hire, a 33-year-old with little by way of managerial experience. But O’Neal had a redeeming quality: He was ready to shill for Bezos, and the man Bezos has been desperately wooing, President Donald Trump.

It’s remarkable how far Bezos has come since 2013, when he said he purchased the Post from the Graham family out of a sense of civic duty.

Bezos was still singing a similar tune nearly midway through Trump’s first term, telling Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner (4/28/18), “I would be humiliated to interfere” with the Post’s coverage. “I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red…. It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”

But days before the 2024 election, with Trump looking like he might return to the White House, Bezos apparently got over his queasiness and personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). “Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos,” the Wall Street Journal (7/2/26) reported.

Bezos followed up by declaring that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets,” while “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Coming a month into Trump’s second term, this came across as another gift to the president (FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

‘Unapologetically patriotic’

To lead the newly oriented Opinions page, Bezos tapped O’Neal, who had been a correspondent for the Economist, editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and executive editor at the conservative Dispatch for just one year.

In that last role—apparently O’Neal’s only newsroom managerial experience—he quickly alienated the Dispatch staff. “He was a competent editor who had no idea how to talk to another human being,” a former associate of O’Neal’s told Status (7/18/25):

He was tough on reporters, sure, but that’s common in newsrooms. He just couldn’t express even the most minor thing without being abrasive, hostile or raising his voice.

After being named to his post in June 2025, O’Neal declared that Post Opinions would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “communicate with optimism about this country.” This echoed Bezos, who declared a month into Trump’s second term, “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.” Bezos was, of course, echoing Trump’s “America first” rhetoric.

O’Neal has demonstrated his patriotism by overseeing an editorial page that has backed Trump in destroying the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25), kidnapping the Venezuelan president (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26), militarily taking over DC (8/11/25; FAIR.org, 8/14/25), and unprecedented gerrymandering (8/20/25). (When Democrats responded in kind, the Post decried the “power grab”—4/21/26).

The Post’s pro-Trump boosterism under O’Neal has been so over the top, wrote Chris Lehmann (The Nation, 2/4/26), it’d “be a stretch for Pravda to pull off.”

“I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes,” a current Post staffer told Status (5/10/26). “I can’t tell if some of these arguments are being made in good faith or not. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”

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‘Being reconciled is not enough’

While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants (FAIR.org, 1/7/25)—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation.

Shipley had voiced concern over the direction Bezos was taking the Post, warning the billionaire that spiking the Harris endorsement days before the election and yanking Opinions rightward could turn off subscribers. “I don’t care,” Bezos replied (New York Times, 3/14/26). (Shipley proved correct; Bezos’ interventions led to over 375,000 Post readers canceling their subscriptions—NPR, 1/30/26.)

Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”

Seeing the writing on the wall, many of the Post’s centrist and left-of-center columnists took the generous buyouts on offer (which some had been contemplating since before O’Neal was hired). Gone in quick succession were Perry Bacon Jr., Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, Joe Davidson, Marc Fisher, Glenn Kessler, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson, Eduardo Porter and others. “It’s just an absolute exodus,” a Post staffer told Politico (7/28/25).

The paper’s last full-time Black Opinions columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired in September 2025 (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; FAIR.org, 9/23/25). (Theodore R. Johnson of New America writes roughly once a week as a contributing columnist, but is not on staff.)

Bezos hollowed the Post out further in February when he laid off nearly half of the newsroom, in what “may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation” (Washingtonian,2/9/26).

Publicly, Bezos claimed he was doing this for the long-term viability of the paper. To be relevant, the Post has to be a “profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin (CNBC, 5/20/26). Otherwise, “it would be like poetry without rhyming.”

Privately, however, Bezos told Trump that Post employees “are terrible…. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book Regime Change.

To make the Post more like his other companies, Bezos needed “hell yes” management, like Adam O’Neal (and former publisher Will Lewis).

O’Neal, in turn, needed fellow travelers, and seems to have hired exclusively MAGA-friendly columnists. According to media critic Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 5/22/26), the Post

purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches [and] tedious anti-woke screeds.

‘A whole bunch of incredible miracles’

O’Neal’s fealty to Bezos is most blatant in Opinions’ approach to artificial intelligence.

“All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” Bezos told the Financial Times (6/11/26). “We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI,” he continued, sounding every bit the snake oil salesman. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”

And Bezos is banking on these miracles to expand his empire on earth and in space. Despite being worth a quarter-trillion dollars, Bezos is presently scouring the globe to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy companies in industrial sectors and improve them using AI (Forbes, 3/19/26). Bezos’ latest effort aligns neatly with his new role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a low-profile AI company that’s raised $18 billion in funding (Morning Brew, 6/12/26).

Meanwhile, Amazon—the company Bezos founded, where he remains the largest shareholder and executive chair—“recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive bets on artificial intelligence, audacious even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s ongoing trillion-dollar AI bacchanalia,” Bloomberg reported (5/14/26).

With so much on the line, Bezos has little patience for doomsayers who fear AI will cause mass job loss—the very thing Wall Street is salivating over. Sure, AI will be “shrinking the number of people needed by 10x,” Bezos told the Wall Street Journal (6/11/26). But the technology will in fact create “more than 10x” as many jobs, he said. The suggestion seems to be that more than 90% of us will soon be in hitherto unimagined job categories made possible by artificial intelligence. (Bezos’ fellow tech titans recently started following his lead and saying similar things about AI job losses.)

Despite Bezos’ rosy outlook, “the public isn’t so reassured,” the Journal reported (6/13/26) two days later, citing a Pew Research Center survey from March. “Only 17% of Americans say AI will have an overall positive effect on the US over the next 20 years.”

And the data centers needed to power AI fare little better. “Americans have changed their minds about data centers. Decisively,” reported the outlet Heatmap (6/2/26), which conducted a recent poll. “At least seven in 10 Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home…a record low.”

Opposition to data centers—and their insatiable demand for power and water—has become “The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer,” according to a New York Times headline (5/1/26).

‘Data centers don’t deserve so much hate’

With the American people on one side of the AI divide, and Bezos and his fellow tech oligarchs on the other, O’Neal has rushed to his boss’s rescue (FAIR.org, 11/20/25). Here are some recent Opinions headlines (a couple have been subsequently altered):

• “Why the AI Jobs Panic Is Misplaced” (2/17/26)

• “Halting Data Center Construction Will Entrench Inequality” (3/24/26)

• “High Energy Bills? Blame the Trial Lawyers” (4/24/26)

• “Blocking the Construction of Data Centers Is a National Security Risk” (5/28/26)

• “AI Backlash Threatens to Hold Kids Back” (6/21/22)

• “AI Is Sparking a Boom in Blue-Collar Jobs…” (6/22/26)

Beyond the dutiful headlines themselves, the editorials also fail to disclose Bezos’ AI ties—which is not unusual. “What the Post’s data-center cheerleading only intermittently mentions is its owner’s vested interest in the topic,” noted Paul Farhi (Washingtonian, 6/23/26), the Post’s former media reporter. “I was unable to find a single editorial or opinion column opposing [AI data centers’] construction over the past six months.”

One of O’Neal’s top deputies, James Hohmann, took things a step further (while also failing to note Bezos’ ties to AI). Hosting an episode (5/26/26) of Opinions’ new flagship podcast, Make It Make Sense—headlined “Why Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate”—Hohmann “described climate activists as a ‘cult’ and argued that the media is ‘guilty’ of fueling ‘hysteria’ over climate change,” Status (6/7/26) summarized. It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.

Even as Bezos hollows out the rest of the Post, money is flowing to Make It Make Sense, which has a well-appointed new studio. So far, however, “the investment has produced an astonishingly small audience,” Status reported (5/11/26). “It does feel like this is just for an audience of one,” a former Post staffer told the outlet.

Bernie Sanders, ‘leading Luddite’

As grassroots fights against AI data centers spring up from coast to coast, opposition in the Senate is led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who introduced a bill to place a two-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers.

Already a bête noire of the Post (FAIR.org, 3/8/16), Sanders’s critique of data centers has led to a renewed thrashing. In a March editorial (3/25/26) headlined “Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on His Dumbest Idea,” the Post placed Sanders at “the lunatic fringe” of society for “throwing sand into the gears of progress.” The editorial also called Sanders “the leading Luddite of the 2020s.”

Two weeks later, the Post (4/8/26) returned to the “L” word, this time in an editorial that didn’t mention Sanders, but did associate opposition to data centers with domestic terrorism:

The mob-like movement against data centers that’s been gaining traction across the country took a dark turn this week. Indianapolis Councilor Ron Gibson (D), who supports a project to build such a facility in his district, woke up early Monday to the sound of 13 gunshots fired at his home. The gunman left a note on the lawmaker’s doorstep: “NO DATA CENTERS.”

No one was injured, but the incident illustrates how opposition to artificial intelligence can metastasize into an irrational frenzy. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that deranged Luddites turn to violence to fight the advancement of frontier technology.

Later that month, the Post’s editorial page was back to attacking Sanders. Under a scowling picture of the senator, a Post editorial (4/30/26) charged that Sanders

is as naive now as he was during the Cold War. Rarely, if ever, has the socialist met an enemy of the United States who he doesn’t think he can partner with to advance his agenda. The same impulse that led Sanders to cozy up to the Soviets, the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro in the 1980s was on display again Wednesday night at the Capitol as he invited two Chinese academics to urge Americans to slow-roll our pursuit of artificial intelligence.

“Of course that’s what Beijing wants Washington to do,” the Post continued, in a brazen attempt to paint skepticism of AI data centers—a view held by most Americans—as anti-American.

The Post’s inflammatory editorial mentioned neither Bezos or Amazon, per usual.

The billionaire project

It’s not just Bezos’ financial interests that are advanced by O’Neal’s Opinions page, but also Bezos’ and his fellow billionaires’ broader ideological project (Real News Network, 5/22/26).

Under O’Neal’s watch, no tax on the wealthy seems to go uncensured. “The Post has weighed in on tax policy everywhere from Switzerland to Seattle, lambasting every attempt to reduce the grotesque inequality of our times,” Nathan Robinson wrote in a detailed review of the Post Opinions page for The Nation (4/21/26):

Almost no tax on the rich around the world escapes the paper’s notice—one might wonder why capital gains taxes in the Netherlands are a priority for a DC paper.

And no social program appears too small to earn O’Neal’s ire, not even diapers. In providing 400 free diapers to new parents, “California’s nanny state is taking infantilization to a new level,” decried a Post editorial (5/12/26).

Other recent Post editorials have “opposed minimum wage increases, tenant protections, social housing, rent control, free buses, caps on credit card interest rates, caps on the prices of staple foods, congestion pricing and even the Railway Safety Act,” wrote Robinson.

But when government largesse flows to the rich, the Post is more open minded. The Trump administration’s request for another $200 billion for the Iran War, as well as a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, both received the Post’s blessing (3/21/26, 5/12/26). “Peace doesn’t come cheap,” the Post wrote.

Left unmentioned in the editorials is that Bezos’ empire—via his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS—holds billions of dollars worth of Pentagon contracts.

* This story was originally published at FAIR.org and reposted at Common Dreams, Monthly Review and Truthdig.

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Jawando is in a three-way race for county executive, with polls showing him slightly behind Andrew Friedsen and a bit ahead of Evan Glass. All three are members of the Montgomery County Council.

One of the interesting things about the race is who’s not on the ballot — the incumbent, Marc Elrich.

First elected in 2018, Elrich, a longtime democratic socialist, overcame millions of dollars in attack ads from his wealthy opponent and real estate honchos. Elrich was also subjected to hysterical tirades from the Washington Post, which claimed “he would imperil the county’s economic and fiscal prospects.”

After four years in office, however, the Post’s sky-is-falling promises hadn’t panned out. Montgomery — Maryland’s largest county, home to over a million residents — was in good financial shape and voters were open to returning Elrich to office in 2022.

To stop that from happening, the anti-Elrich gang got back together, this time adding California billionaire Dustin Moskovitz to their well-heeled crew. But the result was the same; Elrich once again eked out a win, this time by just 32 votes.

Unable to beat him at the ballot box, Elrich’s opponents found another way to get rid of him. In 2024 they backed a referendum limiting the county executive to two terms, which passed with ease.

Elrich, for his part, isn’t going quietly into the night. He’s back on the ballot this year, seeking a return to the Montgomery County Council. He also has thoughts on who should succeed him: Jawando, the progressive 43-year-old lawmaker with an Obama-esque biography (Obama even joked that Jawando was “apparently my long-lost brother”).

Like Elrich, Jawando is backed by unions and progressive groups like Casa in Action. Also like Elrich, he’s opposed by wealthy real estate investors, who are once again spending massively to keep him out of office.

Much of that spending comes via the ironically named Affordable Maryland PAC, a super PAC created in 2022 to defeat Elrich, and seeded with $500,000 from Moskovitz, the California billionaire.

Affordable Maryland PAC has so far spent over $966,000 on TV ads attacking Jawando, and over $80,000 on TV ads attacking Glass, the Banner reported. The PAC hasn’t officially endorsed a candidate, but its spending indicates it wants Friedsen, with whom it shares some donors.

Not all are thrilled with the PAC’s intervention in the race. One of its anti-Jawando TV ads was so over the top that Senator Chris Van Hollen, who hasn’t endorsed in the county executive race, took to social media to condemn it. “There’s no place for outside super PAC ads that lie about any of the candidates or their records,” Van Hollen said. “And I’m frankly sickened by the ad I saw that lies about Will Jawando’s record on education.”

While Affordable Maryland PAC’s ads may be misleading, they’re also ubiquitous, and having their intended effect. In a June 2 polling memo — reported on by Montgomery Perspective — the PAC described the race as now being “a genuine two-way contest” between Friedsen and Jawando, while openly boasting that it has swung the election away from Jawando.

“The race has broken our way because our ads are working,” the PAC’s memo states.

Jawando’s standing has eroded under sustained negative pressure specifically linked to our advertising campaign… His net favorability has fallen from +21 in January to +7 today, a 14-point swing. The decline is concentrated entirely on the negative side: his unfavorables doubled from 15% to 31%… For the candidate who began the cycle as the best-known, best-liked name in the field, that is a real reversal, and it tracks our paid-communications window. It is quite clear that our ads are working.

To be honest, I find it refreshing that Affordable Maryland PAC openly brags about swinging the election, rather than hiding its hand.

But if last week’s DC election is any indication, the PAC may come up short again in Montgomery County.

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Published at Counterpunch

President Trump just did a remarkable thing. Of course we Democrats can’t say so, since we’re an opposition party defined by opposing Trump, not war. (Top Democrats actually wanted the war with Iran, although they kept it low key.) But make no mistake, Trump was right to step off the escalation trap and take us from a war footing with Iran, towards peace.

Democrats are quick to point out that this was a war of Trump’s choice in the first place (which it was), that Iran will soon have billions of dollars filling its coffers (which it apparently will), and that Iran exits the war in a stronger geopolitical position than it started, thanks to its now-established ability to control the Strait of Hormuz when it so chooses.

These are all good and accurate points, but do they matter right now? We were (and are still) faced with a stark choice: do we want more war — killing Iranian men, women and children, while further stressing Americans at the pump — or peace?

If the answer wasn’t obvious enough, here’s another factor to consider: the more war option comes with a nonzero chance of the US or Israel dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran, as I worried out loud in April:

Maybe because I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, I’m struggling to see how the US and Israel’s war on Iran ends without Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation being realized.

I arrived at that horrifying conclusion by being unable to square the following circle: Donald J. Trump cares most in this world about appearing strong; indeed, he built his empire on this premise. But it’s not just a business strategy; Trump struggles to accept reality when it runs counter to this self-image. If that sounds far-fetched, ask him who won the 2020 election.

If he can’t accept losing to Joe Biden, a fellow white Christian, how can Trump admit battlefield defeat to darker-skinned Muslims he called “animals”? Yet Trump has indeed lost…

Unable to admit defeat, Trump is living in a twilight zone. Right now, any Tom, Dick or Bibi who presents Trump with an idea that keeps his victory fantasy alive even for a few more days, is liable to get the green light. When these “brilliant” ideas inevitably fail – Let’s blockade the Strait of Hormuz to unblock it! – Trump is left only more susceptible to the next charlatan who enters the Oval Office.

I didn’t think Trump had it in him to step back from the brink, yet that’s exactly what he’s done. Factions within his own party are furious, while Democrats see a chance to score political points — but they should tread carefully, writes Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft:

Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well…

The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning. Democrats can condemn the decision to start it without sabotaging the agreement that ends it. They can hold Trump accountable without helping Netanyahu drag the United States back into conflict. The choice before them is not between opposing Trump and supporting peace. It is between learning from America’s endless wars and repeating them.

Watching Trump’s extraordinary press conference on the Iran deal at the G7 Summit in France on Wednesday, I was most encouraged when I heard him say that he didn’t want to be remembered as another Herbert Hoover, a president who diddled around as the US fell into the Great Depression.

Normally Trump’s compulsion to be remembered has him etching his name on everything, like a dog lifting its leg at every corner. But in this instance, Trump’s compulsion worked to our advantage. To avoid being the next Hoover — which was a real possibility if the war continued and the global economy cratered — Trump is moving towards peace. And he’s doing so based on his own self-interest, which is good because that’s pretty much the only reason Trump will do anything. God bless whoever whispered the Hoover comparison in Trump’s ear.

I realize there are still many impediments to peace, not least of which is the mercurial US president himself. But in the interim, we’re talking with Iran, not blowing up their elementary schools.

Another major impediment to peace is Israel, which got us into this war in the first place, and which might cease functioning as a country if it doesn’t have a war to fight. (The ritual slaughter of Palestinians just won’t cut it these days.)

Desperate to keep the Iran war going, Israel has been furiously attacking Lebanon in hopes of forcing Iran to come to the defense of its ally, Hezbollah, which in turn may blow up the US-Iran deal being negotiated. A draft of that deal calls for Israel to stop attacking Lebanon (the text doesn’t name Israel, but says the US and Iran will be “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon”).

While Trump may be an unstable man who you and I detest, he just (hopefully) ended our war with Iran — a country we had no business attacking this year, last year, or back in 1953. Regardless of the shameful backstory to the war, if only to preserve our species, Trump’s latest move is to be commended.

Like President Nixon did with China, Trump is putting things on the table that no Democrat would ever dream of. He’s proposing to do no less than bring Iran in from the cold by waving sanctions and allowing in billions in investment from Iran’s Gulf neighbors, thereby interweaving the region’s economies, an important step in making their return to hostilities less likely. Not even President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was excellent, went anywhere near this far in incorporating Iran into the global economy. Right before our eyes, Trump is blowing up the bipartisan consensus that Iran is the boogeyman, which was always bullshit.

Lastly, Trump is also putting Israel in its place in a way no president has before, certainly not in my lifetime. And Vice President JD Vance went even father Thursday, issuing a stark warning to Israeli critics of the peace deal.

“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” so maybe think twice before “attacking the only powerful ally” you have left, Vance warned, adding, “two-thirds” of Israel’s weapons over the past three months have been “paid for by American taxpayers.”

Obviously Trump is fickle, and he may be back to threatening Iran with nuclear holocaust by this time tomorrow. But right now he’s tuned to a better channel, and it’s important that Democrats not impede a potential peace deal.

“Trump and Netanyahu should never have started the war on Iran, and Congress should have stopped it,” peace activist Medea Benjamin of Code Pink wrote on her Substack page.

But now it has to end. There is an agreement on the table, and we should do everything we can to make it work. The priority has to be ending the bloodshed—not finding new excuses to prolong it.

Two decades of closely following the Post have taught me that the paper’s evaluation of DC candidates is based on one issue above all others — their approach to Black Washingtonians. Candidates attentive to the needs of this population are targeted for defeat, while those pushing further gentrification receive the Post’s backing.

It may sound overly simplistic, too black and white if you will, but I’ve been around long enough to know better.

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To understand from whence the Post’s approach comes, we need to dial the clock back to a time when the paper and its prior owners, the Graham family, were more open about their intentions.

Rewinding the clock to the 1950s, we find ourselves in a city whose residents aren’t allowed to elect their own local representatives. Congress only granted DC “Home Rule” in 1973, and the city still lacks full congressional representation or statehood.

The reason for withholding democracy from the nation’s capital wasn’t hard to discern — it was too Black.

Then-Post publisher Phil Graham could have fought this injustice. Instead, he sought to fill the democratic void by creating his own shadow government. In 1954 — just as DC was on the verge of becoming the first major US city with a majority Black population — Graham’s official-sounding “Federal City Council” was born.

Unlike the diverse city it sought to lead, Graham’s group was made up of downtown business owners like himself. “This was basically a white man’s business organization in a city that was very divided,” later-board chair Terry Golden said at the group’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Golden was one of a long line of developers and real estate investors who joined the Federal City Council. Not infrequently these insiders won contracts working on the big-ticket projects the group pushed for. “It’s self-serving, of course,” veteran Federal City Council member R. Robert Linowes told the Post in 1994. “But it’s self-serving in the best possible way in my view because it helps stimulate a better, more valuable urban community.”

For its maiden project, Graham’s group — despite lacking even a pretense of democratic legitimacy — sought the removal of 23,000 residents of Southwest DC, who were mostly Black and living in poverty just blocks from the shining US Capitol.

This effort — one of the earliest examples of so-called “urban renewal” — proved so successful that former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asked, as she toured the area in 1959, “What has happened to the people who once lived here?” The answer: they’d been “dumped unceremoniously across the Anacostia river,” the Economist reported years later.

This history forms the DNA of the Post, which frequently lent its leadership to the Federal City Council (“many Post executives had been or were members,” Katharine Graham, who succeeded her husband Phil as Post publisher, wrote in her 1997 memoir). Meanwhile the Post cheered the group at every turn; “The Post has provided consistent editorial support for the FCC’s projects, particularly its earlier ones,” the paper acknowledged in a parenthetical in 1994.

This forgotten history helps to explain why the Post, even to this day, reflexively opposes DC candidates attentive to the needs of Black residents.

And this election is no exception. The Post’s attacks against mayoral frontrunner Janeese Lewis George have been entirely predictable. She is, after all, a democratic socialist who seeks to lessen DC’s deep inequality.

Unlike in past campaigns, however, the Post’s attacks don’t seem to be landing. The paper simply doesn’t have the same sway over DC voters as it used to — in no small part because the Post has gone out of its way to offend its readership.

That starts at the top, with owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post from the Grahams in 2013 for $250 million, and has lately been using the once-storied paper as a means to ingratiate himself to President Trump.

With the Post discredited — and former DC council member Kenyan McDuffie running a lackluster campaign — come Tuesday, Lewis George may become the Democratic nominee, and presumptive next mayor. (Her candidacy got a boost Thursday when Trump weighed in on the race, saying a Lewis George win may prompt him to “take back Washington, run it on the federal basis.”)

If elected, the city Lewis George will lead is one that has been made in the Post’s image. Today DC is less than half Black, a dramatic decline from the 1970s, when the city’s Black population topped 70 percent, earning it the moniker “Chocolate City.” DC’s decades-long gentrification project — which Graham’s shadow government kickstarted — has resulted in levels of inequality that approach apartheid-like.

Think I’m overstating the case? A 2016 study by the Urban Institute found that DC’s white households had over 80 times as much wealth as its Black households.

This didn’t happen by accident. The extraordinary wealth DC generated over the years, as property values soared, could have been broadly shared and used to uplift DC’s Black residents, not uproot them. But politicians who attempted to do this were targeted like clockwork by the Post. Meanwhile politicians who furthered gentrification were treated with kid gloves — see Jack Evans, for example.

Under Mayor Lewis George, DC could finally take steps to address its yawning inequality. The mildly redistributive approach that she’ll pursue — the most that American politics will allow — won’t be enough to make the nation’s capital even remotely equal. But at least it’s a start in the right direction — one the Post will no doubt protest furiously.

In my story for FAIR last week, I criticized the reporting of Paul Schwartzman, and I’m afraid I’m doing so again today. Schwartzman is a solid reporter, and it can’t be easy being at the Washington Post these days… not with the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, taking a wrecking ball to the place to further ingratiate himself to President Trump (it’s working). Nevertheless, Schwartzman’s coverage of the forthcoming DC election warrants another look.

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For FAIR, I looked at how Schwartzman went after lefty DC mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George for the sin of attending her DC Council colleague’s birthday picnic. The colleague, Trayon White Sr., faces federal bribery charges (a case I wrote about previously).

Meanwhile Schwartzman’s approach to covering the race for DC delegate, DC’s mostly nonvoting member of Congress, has been markedly different. In that race, Schwartzman lets candidate Brooke Pinto shape the narrative surrounding her partying with a figure far more toxic to DC voters than White — Donald Trump.

Pinto’s top opponent — fellow DC council member Robert White, who leads in the polls — has tried to highlight the Pinto family’s ties to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. But Schwartzman isn’t having it, instead relegating the issue to a “he said, she said” situation.

From Schwartzman’s May 26 story:

Where to begin? While Pinto may have “acknowledged… she and members of her clan have been to Trump’s club,” that’s only half the story.

It was only after I broke the story that Pinto and her family had partied at Mar-a-Lago that she acknowledged this, eventually.

Before publishing my 2020 story at Counterpunch, I emailed Pinto several questions about Mar-a-Lago — including how many times she’d been there, and whether her family were members of the club — but she replied only, “I am not a member of Mar-a-Lago nor am I friends with Donald Trump or his family.” Pinto, in other words, initially went out of her way not to acknowledge her or her family’s ties to Mar-a-Lago.

We still don’t know how frequently Pinto visited Trump’s club in the past, and whether her family were members there. Yet Schwartzman leaves Post readers with the impression that Pinto has always been up front about her and her family’s ties to Mar-a-Lago, which isn’t the case.

In Schwartzman’s story, Pinto also gets to shape the narrative surrounding the above photo, which I first published at Counterpunch.

Schwartzman quotes from (but annoyingly doesn’t link to) a video Pinto recently posted on Twitter, in which she confirms that the photo is indeed of her and her family at Mar-a-Lago. But Pinto insists there’s nothing to see here, since the photo is ten years old and taken “before Donald Trump was ever president.”

Once again that’s only half the story. And Schwartzman can’t be bothered to tell the other half.

From my 2020 Counterpunch story:

Six months after Donald Trump kicked off his racist bid for the White House, Pinto and her family appear to have celebrated 2015-16 New Year’s Eve at Trump’s Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago…

To get to Trump’s black-tie event, which reportedly cost $1,000 per couple, the Pintos wouldn’t have had to travel far. Brooke’s parents have a multimillion dollar second home in Palm Beach, just four miles up the road from Mar-a-Lago.

At his New Year’s Eve bash, Trump, then the Republican presidential front-runner, glad-handed guests and in brief remarks pledged to “make America great again!” Then just before midnight, with his family and the Mar-a-Lago party as his backdrop, Trump touted his candidacy live on FOX News.

So, in the midst of Trump’s first bid for the White House, Brooke Pinto and her family attended a pricey party that personally enriched Trump, and doubled as a campaign event for the Republican front-runner.

For a candidate running for high office in deep blue DC, this doesn’t look good, and may even be disqualifying — at least if Schwartzman employed the same “party standard” he uses when covering Janeese Lewis George.

When the lefty mayoral candidate recently stopped by a much humbler affair — her DC Council colleague’s birthday picnic — it set off a wave of hysteria, with Schwartzman helping lead the charge.

The Post’s dramatic headline and subhead below seem designed to make Lewis George look suspicious: “[She] has found herself explaining her appearance at a birthday picnic for indicted council member Trayon White Sr.,” the Post writes, employing a passive voice that hides its own central role in demanding explanations from Lewis George — in ways the paper never has from Pinto.

Look at the picture atop Schwartzman’s story; Lewis George is nowhere to be found, just Trayon White (and a supporter). Two days earlier, the Post editorial page did the same thing under a headlined that blared, “Janeese Lewis George’s ‘mentor.’”

White stands accused of corruption, and the suggestion from the Post is that Lewis George at the very least lacks good judgment because she attended White’s birthday and even said nice things about him. (For the record, there is not a whiff of corruption surrounding Lewis George.)

Of course, Schwartzman doesn’t apply this same standard to Pinto, who he insists has nothing to do with Trump, describing the Pinto family as “Democrats who don’t support the president.” Apparently paying thousands of dollars to party with a candidate mid-campaign, at an event carried live on national television, doesn’t qualify as support.

But Lewis George attending her colleague’s birthday picnic is somehow a scandal.

It just so happens that Pinto doesn’t want to tax the rich (like herself), while Lewis George does. For Schwartzman to stay employed at the billionaire-owned Post — which isn’t easy these days — this is probably the right approach to take.

I’d like to think it was a dare that prompted veteran Washington Post reporter Paul Schwartzman to include Nick Fuentes, the infamous Neo-Nazi sympathizer, in his story (5/22/26) on DC mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George.

The lefty candidate has no known ties to the far-right Fuentes, who lives some 700 miles away in Illinois. Yet there Fuentes was in Schwartzman’s story, alongside three other controversial figures…and the word “terrorist.”

This wasn’t the result of a dare, however. The truth is more mundane: This is just what the Post does in close DC mayoral elections, associating the candidate it wants to lose with extremists and corruption, facts be damned.

The Post did this to DC Mayor Vincent Gray as he sought reelection in 2014 (more on this below), and it’s doing so again today. This time around, the target is Lewis George, a DC council member backed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter.

‘A complicating DC influence’

In his story on Lewis George, Schwartzman managed to name-check not only Fuentes, but also President Donald Trump, lefty streamer Hasan Piker and a DC councilmember charged with corruption.

Schwartzman began:

DC Council member Trayon White Sr.’s stature in local politics was damaged when federal agents videotaped him allegedly agreeing to accept more than $150,000 in bribes from a city contractor.

Two years later, after he pleaded not guilty and awaits trial, White remains a complicating DC influence, as was evident this week when Janeese Lewis George, a council member running for mayor, found herself explaining why she attended his recent birthday picnic and described him as a past “mentor.”

See what Schwartzman did there? Since Lewis George attended her colleague’s birthday party, and even said nice things about him (perhaps the sort of thing one does at a colleague’s birthday), she’s tainted by association—which is the only way to taint Lewis George with corruption, as there’s not a whiff of it surrounding her.

That Lewis George would call White a mentor makes sense, but not to Post readers, who aren’t given the proper context. Before White lost his way and got caught up in a corruption scandal, he was an inspiring organizer, demanding DC do more to address the city’s stark disparities and senseless gun deaths. White’s grassroots work in Southeast DC—the largely Black and highest-poverty quadrant of DC, where White grew up—is what enabled him, against all odds, to win his Ward 8 DC Council seat in 2016. I’d guess that White has attended more funerals for boys and young men than all of his colleagues combined—and he’s spoken about the personal trauma this has caused him (Afro, 6/15/22).

When Lewis George called White her mentor, this is almost certainly what she was referencing; not his corruption scandal, which led Lewis George to join her colleagues in voting for White’s expulsion from the DC Council.

No criticism of ebola outbreak?

In the Post’s telling, however, Lewis George is tainted by White’s present-day scandal, as well as by his long-ago statements—even a boneheaded one he made three years before Lewis George was on the DC Council.

In 2018, White said the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking dynasty, were “controlling the climate.” (White quickly apologized and sought to educate himself on Jewish matters—Washington Post, 3/23/18.)

In his story on Lewis George, Schwartzman highlighted White’s Rothschilds comment—twice. While Schwartzman noted that a spokesperson said that Lewis George “has denounced White’s remark when constituents have voiced concerns at meetings,” the Post reporter left open the possibility that she may not have done so at the time: “No published account of her criticizing him for the remark could immediately be found.”

What a neat trick! Since Lewis George wasn’t in office at the time, she wasn’t questioned about White’s comment—or any number of other issues. So, why stop there? Schwartzman could just as easily do stories on Lewis George’s conspicuous lack of public comment on other alarming 2018 events, like the murder of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, or the last Congolese ebola outbreak.

Having tied Lewis George to White via the birthday party, Schwartzman then used that relationship as the basis for name-dropping other controversial figures, and using the “t” word.

From Schwartzman:

The associations that politicians forge with controversial figures often are fodder for opponents’ attacks. President Donald Trump’s 2022 dinner with Nick Fuentes, a White nationalist, prompted an outcry among Democratic leaders, for example. During New York’s mayoral race last year, Andrew M. Cuomo called on Zohran Mamdani to denounce Hasan Piker, a well-known supporter who had said that America “deserved” the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Mamdani did condemn the remark.)

Notwithstanding Schwartzman’s insinuations, Janeese Lewis George is a straight-laced former prosecutor and third-generation Washingtonian.

‘Fiscal death spiral’

Schwartzman’s efforts are not alone. Two days before his story, the Post editorial page beat him to the would-be birthday party scandal.

Under a picture of Trayon White, a Post editorial (5/20/26)—headlined “Janeese Lewis George’s ‘Mentor’”—concluded, “DC voters will decide in the June 16 primary whether they want this politician’s mentee in the mayor’s office.”

Unfortunately for the Post, many DC voters seem to want this, as polls show Lewis George in the lead—a development that has sent the Post editorial page into a meltdown.

“The socialist mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George” (4/10/26) has “no good ideas” (5/5/26), insists the Post, but lots of bad ones—like “battering landlords for political advantage” (4/12/26), “empowering a self-serving teachers union” (5/14/26), “foolish[ly]” opposing a youth curfew (5/18/25), and using the city’s pensions to finance housing construction (5/29/26). Taken together, the Post (4/10/26) warns, if Lewis George becomes mayor, it “risks pushing DC into a fiscal death spiral.”

It’s ironic to see the Post editorial page so forcefully intervene in an election, after Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) declared that newspaper endorsements only “create a perception of bias.” Of course, Bezos wrote this amid fierce pushback over his personal spiking of the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 (just one of the extraordinary favors—what some might call bribes—that Bezos and his paper have done for Trump.)

Bezos’ 11th-hour “no endorsements” dictum only applies to presidential endorsements, not local ones, for some unexplained reason.

Farrakhan, always Farrakhan

Even as the Washington Post is busy throwing everything at the wall in the hopes that something sticks to Lewis George, the paper hasn’t brought up Louis Farrakhan. But another publication has picked up the slack.

The purpose of Jewish Insider, as best I can tell, is to investigate every sneeze from a DSA-backed candidate—like Lewis George or New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—to see if any of us Jews were in the vicinity at the time, to determine whether this might be an act of antisemitism.

Over the course of the DC mayoral campaign, Jewish Insider has published nearly a dozen stories on Lewis George and the supposed threat she poses to the Jewish community.

Jewish Insider’s anti–Lewis George campaign kicked off (2/25/26) over her response on a DSA candidate questionnaire, where she wrote:

I share the opinion of the UN Independent International Commission, that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. I’ve said before, and I’ll say here again: What is happening to the people of Gaza defies humanity. And leaders should not turn a blind eye.

On the questionnaire, Lewis George also wrote that she wouldn’t attend events “promoting Zionism and apartheid,” while noting that, as mayor, she will meet with constituents she disagrees with, as she has throughout her six years as Ward 4 council member. The Insider turned for comment to Ron Halber of the Jewish Community Relations Council, who called the DSA questionnaire an “antisemitic manifesto” that “mak[es] the price of their endorsement the social exclusion of Jews.”

About a half-dozen Jewish Insider stories later, we arrive at Farrakhan. How, you may wonder, do we get from Lewis George to the 93-year-old leader of the Nation of Islam, who, like Fuentes, lives in Illinois? Once again, via the Trayon White bank shot.

In the wake of Lewis George attending White’s 42nd birthday, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch (5/18/26) wrote that in 2018:

White donated $500 from a local fund, earmarked for Ward 8 constituents, to an event in Illinois featuring the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan…. Lewis George has had her own dust-ups with the Washington Jewish community in the course of the mayoral race this year.

Those “dust-ups” haven’t stopped Lewis George from securing endorsements from the Jews United for Justice Campaign Fund and the DC Council’s senior Jewish lawmaker, Brianne Nadeau.

‘Old race warrior’

What’s so depressing about the attacks on Lewis George isn’t just how off-base they are, but how unoriginal.

The last time DC had a close mayoral election was 2014, when Mayor Vince Gray sought a second term. To stop him, the Post discarded journalistic norms to go for his jugular (FAIR.org, 2/1/24). This ugly history should be taught as a warning in journalism schools, but instead it’s being repeated (albeit at a less intense cadence: In the nine days before 2014 early voting began, the Post ran an incredible seven editorials targeting Gray).

Above, I described the approach to tie Lewis George to corruption and Farrakhan as the Trayon White bank shot. In fact, it should be called the Ward 8 bank shot.

In the 2014 race, it was White’s predecessor as Ward 8 council member, his mentor Marion Barry, who the Post used to attack Gray.

When Barry, a former mayor, endorsed Gray, then-Post columnist Dana Milbank (3/19/14) used the occasion to tie Gray to Barry’s drug use:

Embattled Washington Mayor Vincent Gray called in a notorious predecessor, Marion Barry, to prop up his reelection campaign Wednesday afternoon. Gray got exactly what he deserved.

“Vince Gray,” Barry told a modest crowd in a church basement in Southeast Washington, “is a leader with a solid crack record.”

The self-proclaimed mayor for life caught this Freudian slip. “Track record,” he corrected.

Barry, now a 78-year-old City Council member in failing health, is, famously, the one with the crack record.

Milbank also called Barry, who came out of the civil rights movement, an “old race warrior.”

While Gray led all polls, the Post’s deluge—as well as prosecutorial interference—proved too much, and he lost to Muriel Bowser.

After a dozen years in office, Bowser opted not to seek a fourth term this year. In the race to succeed her, Lewis George’s top opponent is former council member Kenyan McDuffie.

‘Engaging in tribal politics’

Joining Milbank in utilizing the Ward 8 bank shot in 2014 was then–Post columnist Mike DeBonis (3/13/14), who wrote:

If Gray is engaging in tribal politics, he’s certainly doing it more subtly than the master of the trade, Marion Barry…[who] after his 1990 drug arrest…was not shy about sending signals to his African-American base—embracing the support of Louis Farrakhan and other controversial activists.

Like Lewis George, Gray has no ties to Farrakhan. What’s more, as a student at George Washington University in the 1960s, Gray joined a Jewish fraternity, where he was one of three Black students to integrate the school’s all-white fraternity system.

Fast-forward a dozen years, and the Post’s bete noire has changed names, but the paper’s tactics remain much the same.

This time around, however, it’s less certain the paper will come out on top. The billionaire-owned Post has so discredited itself in the intervening years that it may not be able to prevent the nation’s capital from electing a democratic socialist.

Published at Counterpunch

Jack Evans’ bid for DC Council chairman has ended with a whimper. Unable to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot, Evans dropped out of the race last week, he told WUSA9. This marks a stunning rebuke for a man who served a record 29 years on the DC Council, including an incredible two decades atop the powerful finance and revenue committee.

As finance chair, Evans prioritized public spending on billion-dollar stadiums over efforts to stabilize vulnerable residents, helping fuel DC’s runaway gentrification. As he did this, Evans quietly enriched himself and his private patrons, an arrangement that finally caught up with him in his last year in office.

But from the moment Evans was forced out of office, he’s been trying to claw his way back. Only ten days after resigning in disgrace in 2020, Evans announced his candidacy for his just-vacated seat. Touchingly, the Washington Post, Evans’ longtime booster, came to his aid once again, with columnist Colbert King declaring Evans a “promising” candidate who “remains the District’s most knowledgeable and experienced lawmaker on the tax code and city finances.” DC voters, however, felt differently, and Evans won just 4% in the ward he’d represented for nearly three decades.

In the ensuing years, Evans somehow found his way back onto the DC payroll, quietly landing an apparently make-work job that paid six figures, Washington City Paper reported. But Evans wasn’t content; his eyes were always on the prize of returning to power.

So earlier this year Evans launched a second comeback bid, this time for DC Council chairman. His subsequent defeat — if you can even call it that — seems likely to mark the final nail in his political coffin.

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Friends in high places

What infuriates me most about Evans, who I’ve covered for nearly twenty years, is that he’s never been held legally accountable for his corruption — aside from having his DC law license suspended for 180 days, and having to pay $55,000 in ethics fines to DC. Meanwhile, over the years I’ve watched one Black politician after another frog-marched out of office, and often into jail, for comparatively nothing.

The stark contrast owes in part to the composition of Evans’ secret patrons. They were some of DC’s heaviest hitters, folks like parking magnate Rusty Lindner, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond while he quietly paid Evans. These aren’t the type of folks who go to jail. And I can’t help but believe that Evans was never charged for fear that he might squeal on these heavy hitters to save himself.

Recently I’ve been thinking back to my biggest scoop on Evans. It involved his employment at a lobby firm that represented both Pepco, the local utility company, and Exelon, the Illinois-based nuclear energy giant attempting to buy Pepco at the time.

Back in 2015, only a little-known DC regulator, the Public Service Commission, stood in the way of Exelon’s $6.8 billion takeover of Pepco. So Evans got to work, calling on the three-person PSC to reverse its prior ruling blocking the merger, which it subsequently did.

I detailed this sordid affair in a 2016 HuffPost story, not-so-subtly headlined “Some Go To Jail—Not Jack Evans.” Three years later, the FBI requested documents from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and DC councilmembers related to Evans’ dealings with a number of companies, including Exelon and Pepco, and their lobby firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips, where Evans moonlighted from 2015 to 2017. But the federal investigation, which included an FBI raid of Evans’ Georgetown home, quietly came to a close in 2022. This stands in contrast to other states, where officials with overly close ties power companies, including Exelon, keep going to jail.

Despite these shady dealings — and many more — Evans has avoided jail time. That’s not just because of his high-society clients, but also due to the handiwork of his friend, DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.

I recently recounted how Mendelson subtly aided Evans in his hour of need; and how Evans repaid his friend by trying to take his job as chairman. The only thing more astonishing than Evans’ disloyalty is his inability to secure a place on the ballot, which marks an extraordinary rebuke from DC voters, and an appropriate end to Evans’ career.

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Last week, President Trump threatened Iran’s 93 million people with annihilation. This week, we’ve largely moved on, if only to keep up with the whipsawing events of the Iran War – now paused, or maybe not, hit refresh on Trump’s social media page to find out.

But I’m still stuck in last week. Maybe because I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, I’m struggling to see how the US and Israel’s war on Iran ends without Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation being realized.

I arrived at that horrifying conclusion by being unable to square the following circle: Donald J. Trump cares most in this world about appearing strong; indeed, he built his empire on this premise. But it’s not just a business strategy; Trump struggles to accept reality when it runs counter to this self-image. If that sounds far-fetched, ask him who won the 2020 election.

If he can’t accept losing to Joe Biden, a fellow white Christian, how can Trump admit battlefield defeat to darker-skinned Muslims he called “animals”? Yet Trump has indeed lost. “The single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president in my lifetime has made, was going to war with Iran in an effort to change its regime,” said Tucker Carlson, whose opposition to attacking Iran has upended his friendship with the president.

Unable to admit defeat, Trump is living in a twilight zone. Right now, any Tom, Dick or Bibi who presents Trump with an idea that keeps his victory fantasy alive even for a few more days, is liable to get the green light. When these “brilliant” ideas inevitably fail – Let’s blockade the Strait of Hormuz to unblock it! – Trump is left only more susceptible to the next charlatan who enters the Oval Office.

Meanwhile the real-world consequences mount in rising fuel prices at home and body counts abroad. The US and Israel have killed over 2,000 Iranians to date. And Israel has matched that number in Lebanon, where it is turning the southern part of that country into a Gaza-like moonscape. And all Trump can muster in response, even as Israel’s assault threatens a fragile ceasefire with Iran, is to ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “be sort of a little more low-key” with his war crimes.

Trump’s obeisance to Netanyahu stands in stark contrast to his unhinged threats against Iran. “Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted in a genocidal Easter Sunday message that demanded Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” Two days later, Trump followed up by writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Trump, of course, is the leader of the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat. Those nukes were dropped at the end of World War II, transforming the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into hellscapes.

Since then, the world has experienced some close calls, most famously during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. What I find notable about that pitched moment, compared to this one, is that even as leaders of the US and Soviet Union considered blowing up the world, they still aired differing viewpoints amongst themselves, before finding an off-ramp.

Today, it feels like the decision to plunge the world into nuclear war will be made by one man — who’s unstable, surrounded by sycophants, and desperate to change the channel from his disastrous war, not to mention his ties to the world’s most famous pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

And it feels like it’s only a matter of time before a nut job like Netanyahu or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth encourages Trump to make the bad headlines go away by dropping a nuke (or in Netanyahu’s case, just letting him do so).

Over on Fox News, Trump’s close ally Mark Levin has already made the case for nuking Iran. But Trump may not need much convincing; shortly before his first term, Trump reportedly asked what the point of having nukes was if not to use them.

Just how desperate this moment is can be seen in Pope Leo’s plea for Americans to contact their members of Congress.

“I would like to invite everyone to think in their hearts of so many innocent children, so many totally innocent elderly people who would also be victims of this escalation,” Leo told reporters at a papal retreat outside Rome last week. “I would like to invite everyone to pray, but also to seek ways to communicate. Perhaps with congressmen, with authorities, saying that we don’t want war, we want peace.”

I’d like to give the first US-born pope the last word, especially after Trump attacked him for being, among other things, “WEAK on Crime.” (Are popes supposed to be tough on crime?) But there’s one more point I need to raise, and it has to do with the Democrats.

Take my normally thoughtful congressman, Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He recently raised the possibility of invoking the 25^th Amendment, suggesting Trump’s mental deficiencies render him unable to discharge his duties. A New York Times story on Monday, headlined “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate,” echoed Raskin’s concerns.

But the Times story noted that the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment is “moot,” since it requires the support of the cabinet, which remains in Trump’s enthrall. So while Raskin is correct about Trump’s fitness for office — after attacking Leo on Sunday night, Trump posted an image at around 3 AM portraying himself as Jesus — calling for the 25th amendment is unlikely to lead to Trump’s removal anytime soon. But doing so may irk our notoriously thin-skinned leader at the very moment his itchy finger is hovering over the nuclear button.

To be clear, Raskin is far from the only Democrat to poke the unstable bear. Senator Chuck Schumer — who last year taunted Trump for not being tough on Iran — called the president “an extremely sick person.” While Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next Speaker of the House, called Trump “unhinged,” and Representative Ted Lieu called him “batshit crazy,” the Times reported.

Senator Chris Murphy, meanwhile, initially claimed he was worried the Iran War might spin out of control. But the moment we stepped back from the brink and reached a ceasefire, Murphy attacked Trump for allowing Iran to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war began. Such rhetoric only threatens to goad Trump back into war — a war that some Democrats quietly wanted, and certainly didn’t do much to prevent it, Drop Site News reported.

Over the coming days, our job – all of our job – is to find a way for cooler heads to prevail, and to avoid provoking an increasingly irrational Trump.

Almost no one wants to see Iran nuked. But there are a handful of lunatics who do, and they are wildly overrepresented in Trump’s inner circle.

Of course, Trump didn’t win the presidency twice by only listening to loonies. And he still cares about public opinion, at least somewhat, which makes him susceptible to public pressure, as we saw Monday. After portraying himself as Jesus, Trump deleted the post in the face of public backlash, including from the religious right.

A blasphemous post is one thing. Dropping a nuke is another. To ensure that doesn’t happen, we need to register our revulsion now, before it’s too late.

• I inexplicably begin by saying it’s Friday — when it’s quite clearly Wednesday April 15. Whoops.

• My latest story at Counterpunch: President Trump: Please Don’t Nuke Iran

• Trump’s Easter Sunday morning Truth Social post:

• In his first term, Trump reportedly asked what the point of having nukes was if not to use them.

• Some Democrats quietly wanted a war with Iran, and certainly didn’t do much to prevent it, Drop Site News reported.

• At 2:39 AM on April 13, Trump posted an image portraying himself as Jesus — which he then deleted in the face of public backlash.

• Senator Chris Murphy’s cynical politicking.

• Over on Fox News, Trump’s close ally Mark Levin has already made the case for nuking Iran.

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In this edition of Pete’s Pod I discuss my latest story for FAIR.org, which looks at a lesser-known member of President Trump’s little circle of hell: FCC chairman Brendan Carr. Unfortunately, unlike Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, I don’t think Trump is going to fire Carr anytime soon.

After all, Carr just approved “the largest broadcast conglomerate in US history,” allowing the Trump-friendly Nexstar to reach 80% of US households, a blatant violation of the law.

Speaking of the law, Carr’s approval process was so shady — even Ted Cruz objected to it — that a federal judge recently put Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna on hold, and may well kill it.

After Nexstar, the US’s next biggest local TV network is Sinclair, a company I’m more familiar with, as it’s long been overtly, even comically right-wing. Nexstar’s turn to the dark side is more recent, and appears directly aimed at an audience of one: Donald J. Trump (and his FCC lapdog).

Nexstar showcased its new approach last year when it became the first network to ban late-night host Jimmy Kimmel from its ABC affiliates after Carr famously threatened stations, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Lastly, two corrections from the podcast:

• I meant to say the Ellison family is on the verge of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, not Warner Bros. Disney, which is not a thing (and please god won’t be — but who knows, maybe a year from now the Ellisons will own Disney too).

• And I said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the head of the Army, but it was the Army’s chief of staff.

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It’s not exactly breaking news that President Donald Trump endlessly attacks the media, or that his administration lapdogs quickly echo his gripes. But there’s one official who has stood apart, and he’s done so by not only mimicking Trump, but by remaking the US media in his boss’s image, most recently by rushing through local TV broadcast giant Nexstar’s takeover of Tegna.

“Unlike his predecessors, Carr isn’t just another corporate lawyer,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Bai (3/17/26) wrote about Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair:

He is a cultural claims adjuster, a pasty-faced, soft-spoken agent of Trump’s retribution. If you were going to single out the most dangerous functionary in Trump’s little circle of Hell, you’d have plenty of candidates…. But don’t sleep on Brendan Carr. His legacy of awfulness may yet prove more durable.

Trump, unsurprisingly, is a big fan. Carr is “perhaps the most powerful man in this room,” Trump said at a recent White House event honoring the US Naval Academy football team (Guardian, 3/27/26). “He’s trying to make the fake news real and respected again, which is not an easy job.”

‘Results so far’

Carr is more than happy to list for you what he’s done to earn such high praise. “Look at the results so far,” Carr crowed late last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas:

PBS, defunded. NPR, defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well.

Carr’s comments marked a departure from the norm. Wrote Status’ Jon Passantino (3/28/26):

For a sitting FCC chairman—an official tasked with overseeing the nation’s communications infrastructure in an even-handed manner and upholding the agency’s independence—the remarks to a partisan political conference amounted to saying the quiet part out loud. The administration views the news media not as an institution to be protected, but as an enemy to be silenced and controlled—and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

‘GET THAT DEAL DONE!’

Carr’s comments at CPAC, while in line with the swashbuckling persona he’s adopted ever since Trump elevated him to FCC chair last year, were indeed jarring. So much so, that I initially missed what he’d left off his list of accomplishments.

Just a week earlier, Carr had approved a merger creating “the largest broadcast conglomerate in US history” (Free Press, 3/26/26). And he’d done so at the behest of his boss.

“We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” Trump posted in February on Truth Social (2/7/26), his social media platform:

Letting Good Deals get done like Nexstar–Tegna will help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level…. GET THAT DEAL DONE!

Hours after Trump came out in support of the merger, reversing his earlier position, Carr dutifully reposted his boss’s message on Twitter (2/7/26), adding: “President Trump is exactly right…. Let’s get it done.”

Unprecedented—and illegal

Carr’s gung-ho public statement may have pleased Trump, but it came as Carr’s agency was purportedly reviewing Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna. And there was plenty to review, since Nexstar was already the country’s largest local TV network, and post-merger would grow to 265 stations in 44 states and DC (AP, 3/19/26)—a size that wouldn’t just be unprecedented, but illegal.

No local TV network can reach more than 39% of US households, according to the law. In its new configuration, Nexstar would reach 80% of American homes, more than double the legal limit.

Nevertheless, Carr did as Trump instructed, and his agency, after exempting Nexstar from the legal cap on ownership, approved the deal.

While legally problematic, Carr’s move would make for political catnip at CPAC. Yet as he beat his chest at the conference, Carr didn’t highlight his most recent, and possibly most significant achievement. Why not?

Like his father—who represented former President Richard Nixon—Carr is an attorney. And as he looked out at the CPAC attendees, Carr may have worried that gloating over the Nexstar merger might place the deal in further legal jeopardy—and it was already in more than enough.

‘You are going to lose’

Indeed, only hours after Carr spoke, the hammer came down when a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, pausing the merger. “A judge just held up a middle finger to Trump FCC chair Brendan Carr,” wrote anti-trust expert Matt Stoller (Big, 3/29/26), who noted the judge’s order “pretty much called out…Carr for corruption, and essentially told the two companies, ‘You are going to lose this merger case.’”

It’s not hard to see why.

Before Carr approved the merger, the attorneys general from eight states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block it, as did DirecTV. “But just hours later,” Politico (3/28/26) reported,

the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger, bypassing a longstanding cap on the number of viewers a broadcaster can reach nationwide.

The FCC’s approval was also suspect, as it came “without a full Commission vote, and in tight coordination with the merger applicants themselves, who purported to close the deal mere minutes after the order’s appearance,” wrote Matt Wood (Pressing Issues, 3/31/26), an executive at the media advocacy group Free Press, which is part of a public interest coalition that has also sued to stop the Nexstar/Tegna merger.

Even Sen. Ted Cruz, a Trump ally, said the merger should have received a full Commission vote (Guardian, 3/27/26).

“I can’t describe how corrupt and crazy that sequence of events is,” wrote Stoller, the antitrust expert. “You simply do not run roughshod over processes like that.”

But Carr was willing to do so for Nexstar, because it had proved its loyalty to Trump.

‘The easy way or the hard way’

In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s September assassination, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s (innocuous) comments angered the right. Sensing an opportunity to silence Kimmel, a Trump critic, Carr sprang into action, publicly threatening ABC affiliates if they didn’t yank Kimmel’s show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr famously threatened.

Hours later, Nexstar became the first network to heed Carr’s call and cancel Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates. Carr promptly praised the company “for doing the right thing” (X, 9/17/25), adding, “I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.” And Sinclair, the second-largest local TV station network, did just that.

Ultimately, the networks relented in the face of public pressure and resumed airing Kimmel’s show, with Nexstar the last to buckle.

While Carr applauded the networks, others were alarmed at their actions. “If you suspended a late-night comedian’s show in part to seek regulatory favors from the administration,” Elizabeth Warren and three fellow Senate Democrats wrote to the CEOs of Nexstar and Sinclair (which had also lobbied the FCC), there was “the appearance of a possible quid-pro-quo arrangement that could implicate federal anti-corruption laws.”

‘Pro-Trump garbage’

The Kimmel saga was far from the only instance in which Nexstar had demonstrated its loyalty to Trump. Status’ Natalie Korach (2/16/26) reported:

Current and former employees say the network, long marketed as an “unbiased” alternative to traditional cable news, has pivoted rightward in what some view as a transparent effort to curry favor with Trump’s FCC.

The change has been hard to miss over at NewsNation, Nexstar’s news channel, which has served as a landing pad for former Fox News hosts, like Katie Pavlich, who secured a primetime slot, much to Carr’s liking. Pavlich’s first guest was none other than Donald Trump—which fits nicely with her tendency to promote what a NewsNation staffer characterized as “pro-Trump garbage.”

While Pavlich’s ratings are poor, when Trump alone holds the keys to the network’s desired expansion, “how much do ratings matter to Nexstar executives?” Status (2/15/26) asked in a story headlined “NewsNation’s Audience of One.”

Nexstar’s approach has borne fruit. As company CEO Perry Sook noted on a February earnings call in which he saluted Trump, “Having the endorsement of the nation’s chief executive doesn’t hurt in the regulatory agencies.”

A successful fusion of Nexstar and Tegna would further erode the need for actual viewers. As the advocacy group Free Press (3/23/26) pointed out, “One of Nexstar’s stated goals for this merger is to extract higher fees from pay-TV providers—which are ultimately paid by subscribers.” Free Press added:

In addition to costing viewers more, Nexstar wants to serve them less. After past mergers, in market after market, Nexstar has closed newsrooms and cut reporters. Nothing stops it from doing the same here.

‘Great wins from presidents’

Even if the Nexstar/Tegna merger is permanently stopped in court, Carr’s tenure atop the FCC—only 15 months and counting—will be felt for years to come, as the US media rapidly consolidates in the hands of Trump loyalists.

The scope of Carr’s project could be glimpsed on his lapel. A couple months into his chairmanship, Carr “decided to swap out his usual American flag lapel pin,” the New York Times (4/22/25) reported. “Instead of the stars and stripes, he pinned a gold medallion in the shape of President Trump’s profile, about the size of a quarter, to his blue suit.”

Such a move has little precedent, at least in America. The Times compared it to “China under Mao Zedong, where wearing a lapel pin in the form of Mao’s profile became a widespread sign of commitment.”

And now Carr is demanding similar commitment from US networks, as he launches his Pledge America campaign to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.

To celebrate the occasion, broadcasters should “run patriotic, pro-America programming,” Carr told CPAC:

You can start the day with a Pledge of Allegiance, you can run all sorts of programming highlighting the great wins from presidents from George Washington all the way up through President Trump.

But for Matt Wood, “the FCC calling for propaganda while labeling it as ‘patriotism’ does nothing to disguise the ugly, chilling impacts.”

This story was originally published at FAIR, and reposted at Truthdig, Monthly Review and Popular Resistance.

In Brian’s most recent story, on the US strangulation of Cuba, he writes:

As the Iran war continues to show little promise of giving Trump a clear military — and therefore political — victory, military action against Cuba may become a tempting face-saving move.

Brian’s Cuba piece also highlights the delightfully shady background of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose lifelong fixation has been to overthrow the Cuban government (to each his own, I guess).

If the US is ever to get off this hamster wheel of violence — something millions of us yearn for, as evidenced by this weekend’s massive No Kings rallies — we can’t let our news and analysis be filtered through reflexively pro-war, corporate media. Rather, we need to be reading sharp-eyed lefties like Brian.

— Pete

Blockades, Bombs, and Bots

My Latest on Cuba, the Middle East, and Coming Up on Sling Shot Politics

SLING SHOT POLITICS

MAR 30

Friends,

With so much going on in the Middle East and in the U.S., it is easy for other crises and crimes of U.S. empire to fall through the cracks — or get lost in our inboxes.

Since my most recent piece on the suffocating U.S. blockade of Cuba, a number of developments on the activism front are worth noting:

• The Nuestra América Convoy returned last week from Cuba. A delegation organized by Progressive International, CODE PINK, and others brought hundreds of activists from more than 30 countries, traveling by sea and by air. It included the Granma 2.0 flotilla which brought 30 tons of humanitarian aid to the island.

• Activists who joined the delegation — several of whom were temporarily detained and harassed by DHS officials upon their return — toured hospitals, schools, and participated in a number of solidarity events during their time in Cuba. Many have written illuminating accounts of what they saw there. I recommend checking out this one, by Gerardo Delgado with CODE PINK, as well as this article by Current Affairs writer Nathan J. Robinson, among many others.

• Speaking of Current Affairs, there was a considerable firestorm of right-wing and establishment media voices — from Ben Shapiro to the Washington Post — trashing the activist aid mission, which Robinson and his colleague Alex Skopic at Current Affairs do a good job of rebutting.

Meanwhile, Trump’s oil blockade has forced Cuban doctors to suspend medical procedures for more than 96,000 Cubans in need of surgery, according to Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío. On a positive note, the U.S. has signaled a possible softening of the oil blockade as it will not interfere with a Russian tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil, which is set to reach Cuba by early Tuesday.

What Else?

• Trump’s Israel-driven Iran war quagmire continues to deepen despite the regime in Washington clumsily attempting to convince rattled markets that talks with Tehran are going great and the war is almost complete. While Trump talks up productive negotiations that Iran denied are taking place, U.S. and Israeli forces continue to target civilian centers and infrastructure. Remarkably, the Trump regime has stuck to its optimistic messaging about the war as if the rest of the world is somehow unaware of widely reported U.S. troop deployments to the region and Pentagon plans for a ground war.

• Houthi resistance fighters in Yemen entered the fray over the weekend, firing missiles at Israel and raising the specter of another shipping chokepoint — the Bab al-Mandab Strait — being used as leverage against the U.S. and Israel.

• Suspicious trading ahead of Trump’s announcement of peace talks with Iran early last week points to the shameless depths of his regime’s unbridled corruption and grift. Robert Reich breaks it down here.

• Israel’s devastation of southern Lebanon continues in relative obscurity as U.S. corporate media has the attention span for but one foreign conflict at a time, which is currently reserved for the Iran war. After two and half years of normalizing horrendous war crimes in Gaza, Israel’s ongoing assault on Lebanon, including its assassination of journalists, is all but shrugged off by Western media outlets. Israel has now expanded its ground invasion in Lebanon, with plans to fulfill longstanding aims of seizing Lebanese territory as a “buffer” against Hezbollah, while more than a million people have been displaced and over a thousand have been killed, including 121 children.

• In Gaza, the genocidal nightmare continues, including recent Israeli attacks over the Eid holiday and sickening reports of a toddler tortured by Israeli soldiers in order to extract a confession from the child’s father. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinian communities has reached unprecedented levels as the head of UNRWA warns of “de facto” annexation of territory by Israel.

• ICE agents were dispatched to airports across the U.S. last week to stand in for TSA agents who have gone unpaid for weeks amid the partial government shutdown. Predictable chaos ensued.

• No Kings protests rocked the U.S. from coast to coast over the weekend with an estimated 8 million people mobilizing in resounding opposition to the Trump regime.

Up Next

The next Sling Shot Politics article will look at how AI is being used by Big Tech oligarchs to amass profit, wage war, and decimate the working class — and how communities and workers are fighting back.

In case you missed my most recent piece last week on the struggle in Cuba, [here it is]. As always, if you can like the story on the Substack website or in the app, that would be much appreciated.

Stay tuned and stay ungovernable!

In solidarity,

Sling Shot Politics

Just after the story was published late Friday afternoon, I saw that US District Judge Paul Friedman ruled on the loyalty oath Pete Hegseth required Pentagon reporters to sign last year (or be gone). Friedman’s 40-page ruling in favor of the New York Times is crisply written, and at points soars, including its sweeping conclusion:

[I]n light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing — so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election. As Justice Brandeis correctly observed, “sunlight is the most powerful disinfectant.”

PS - If you like excellent lefty writing and analysis, check out my friend Brian Tierney’s new Substack, Sling Shot Politics. I can’t recommend it highly enough. — Pete

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to be in the midst of two conflicts, one…in Iran, and the other with the American free press over its coverage of the widening Middle East war.
--MS NOW‘s Sydney Carruth (3/13/26)

Last fall, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps was banned from the Pentagon after refusing to sign Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath, which would have bound them to only report information “authorized” by the government (FAIR.org, 9/23/25). They were quickly replaced by pundits from Hegseth-approved outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and Lindell TV, which is “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

But once the Iran War got underway, it dawned on Hegseth that a defense secretary needs to communicate with the whole country, not just the narrow slice of it reached by his favorite right-wing pundits. So Hegseth reversed course, asking the major networks to bring their cameras back to the Pentagon. They agreed, but on one condition: Some of their reporters had to be allowed to return to the press briefing room, too (Washington Post, 3/11/26).

So back they came, albeit now at the back of the room. Few of these reporters—who represent outlets you’ve actually heard of, like ABC, NBC and the New York Times—are called on. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, instead fields questions almost exclusively from handpicked media personalities seated in the front rows. (I’d call them reporters, but if they signed Hegseth’s 2025 oath, as most did, they’re anything but.)

‘Typical gotcha-type question’

When Hegseth stepped to the podium for his first Iran War press briefing on March 2, there was a lot on the line. A skeptical American public wanted to know why President Trump had just launched another regime-change war, the very thing he’d railed against on the campaign trail. But Hegseth had little to offer, aside from “lots of chest-thumping,” a Pentagon reporter told CNN.

For the Q&A, Hegseth “only answered questions from his chosen outlets,” reported CNN’s Brian Stelter (3/4/26), until a journalist in the back lobbed a question about Trump’s changing timeline for the war’s duration. Hegseth initially ignored the interruption, but his anger got the best of him, and he returned to the matter.

“I heard the question about ‘four weeks,’” Hegseth sneered. “It’s the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question.”

Having veered away from his friendly questioners, Hegseth was off script and had to think on his feet, not exactly a strength.

“President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take–four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up, it could move back,” Hegseth said at the opening of a rant that somehow included the word “aperture” and the observation that, “well, I mean, Joe Biden didn’t even know what he was doing.”

‘Only favorable images’

After face-planting at his first Iran War press briefing, Hegseth knew change was needed—only not by him, but with his enemies in the press.

If Hegseth couldn’t kick out any more reporters, who could he get rid of? Scanning the room, he fixed on the photographers.

The Pentagon’s stated reason for banning press photographers after the March 2 briefing was because of space restrictions. But the real reason, the Washington Post (3/11/26) reported, was they took “unflattering” photos of Hegseth.

Now only Pentagon photographers are allowed into briefings, and they are happy to provide the media with approved photos of their boss. Alex Garcia, president of the National Press Photographers Association, told the Post:

Excluding photographers from Pentagon briefings because officials did not like how published images portrayed them shows an astonishingly poor sense of priorities in the midst of a war and is, for a public servant, not a good look…. A free press cannot function if government officials decide that only favorable images of public officials may be created or distributed.

In Hegseth’s March 4 press briefing—without those pesky photographers—he stuck again to his preferred outlets, like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Lindell TV and the Washington Times. He also took one question from a mainstream journalist, Tom Bateman of the BBC, who pressed Hegseth on the US bombing of an elementary school in Minab. “We’re investigating it,” Hegseth replied curtly.

‘A snowflake behind a military shield’

Among the many reporters who didn’t get called on was the Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef, although in her case it was because she wasn’t allowed in. “I, along with print photographers, have been denied entry to cover today’s Pentagon briefing,” Youssef wrote on X. “All other media were allowed in.”

By Hegseth’s next briefing, March 19, his banned list had expanded again. “The Pentagon’s own publication, Stars and Stripes, was disinvited from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest Iran War press conference–as he continues to clamp down on press coverage,” the Independent (3/19/26) reported.

This came less than two weeks after the Pentagon announced it was taking greater control of Stars and Stripes, a paper Hegseth previously claimed had gone “woke” (Daily Beast, 3/19/26). As former Stars and Stripes reporter Kevin Baron (X, 3/19/26) pointed out, the paper’s

employees are US Army civilians. Their editorial independence is protected by Congress specifically to prevent political leaders from feeding troops propaganda.

“Hegseth spent years on a comfortable Fox News couch building a brand around contempt for the thin-skinned and the easily offended,” wrote Status’s Jon Passantino (3/14/26). “But in office, Hegseth has revealed himself to be exactly that—a snowflake behind a military shield.”

‘An actual patriotic press’

As the US and Israel’s war on Iran continues to worsen, Hegseth’s attacks on the media have also escalated. At his March 13 briefing, Hegseth insisted that “an actual patriotic press” wouldn’t write headlines stating the war is expanding, even as the war has sprawled from an initial three countries—Israel, the US and Iran—to over a dozen.

“Allow me to make a few suggestions,” Hegseth offered. “People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines [like]… ‘Mideast War Intensifies,’” he said. “What should the banner read instead? How about, ‘Iran Increasingly Desperate.’”

Hegseth also singled out a CNN story (3/13/26), headlined “Trump Administration Underestimated Iran War’s Impact on Strait of Hormuz.” That story is “patently ridiculous, of course,” Hegseth said, blithely dismissing the strait’s closure, saying we “don’t need to worry about it.”

Hegseth’s worries were directed elsewhere—at CNN. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth said.

Ellison is the 43-year-old nepo baby of billionaire Larry Ellison, a close Trump ally. Having already purchased Paramount, and with it CBS, Ellison is on the verge of closing a $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns, among other media and film properties, CNN.

Hegseth’s comments about Ellison taking over CNN “should be a major scandal,” wrote Craig Aaron (Pressing Issues, 3/17/26), co-CEO of Free Press (the media advocacy group, not the right-wing, Ellison-owned outlet of the same name). “But in the chaos of the Trump administration, he’s just a warm-up act.”

‘Sick and demented people’

Indeed, as Trump’s historically unpopular war continues to sour, he’s sought to place blame on a familiar target: news media. Outlets critically covering the war, Trump posted on Truth Social (3/14/26), “are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.” The next day (3/15/26), he declared they “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Treason is punishable by death.

Trump’s censorious FCC chair, Brendan Carr, backed up his boss: “The law is clear,” he tweeted (3/14/26). “Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Hegseth succinctly outlined what “operating in the public interest” looks like at his March 19 briefing. The press need only say “one thing to President Trump,” he said. “Thank you.”

* This story was originally published at FAIR, and reposted at Truthdig, ScheerPost and Z.

Also discussed:

• Drop Site News reported on how some Democratic leaders low-key supported Trump going to war on Iran.

• CNN reported on Hegseth bringing his Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson to the Pentagon last month for a prayer service. Below is a wild photo from the event.

It wasn’t long into Pete Hegseth’s Monday morning press briefing that I got the feeling he might reach through the screen, grab my throat, and declare war not just on Iran, but me too.

To be fair to our self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” Monday mornings can be a bear. And Hegseth was facing a particularly unenviable one.

Over the weekend Hegseth’s boss, President Donald Trump, launched a war on Iran via a pre-recorded video filmed from the comfort of his Florida redoubt, Mar-a-Lago. (Trump didn’t let the imminent war interrupt his million-dollar-a-head Saturday night fundraiser.)

Not ready to face a barrage of reporters’ questions about his evolving justifications for war, Trump offered up his defense secretary.

So Monday morning, game face on, Hegseth did his best to explain to a skeptical country why we were — at Israel’s prompting — diving headfirst into another Middle East regime-change war; the very thing Trump railed against on the campaign trail.

Standing before a bank of cameras, Hegseth looked well-coiffed (he didn’t install a makeup studio in the Pentagon for nothing!), but also angry — which is not the disposition you hope for in someone atop the world’s greatest killing machine. Operation Epic Fury was, I thought, an apt descriptor not just for our new war, but Hegseth’s mood.

Heavy on fervor, Hegseth’s briefing lacked basic facts and context.

For 47 years, Hegseth began, Iran’s “death cult” has “waged a savage, one-sided war against America.”

Unmentioned was the US’s 1953 overthrow of the secular and democratically elected Iranian government, which insisted on using Iran’s oil to benefit Iranians, not just western oil companies. After the coup, we proceeded to back a brutal dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, for the next quarter century. When Pahlavi, known as the Shah, finally fell in 1979, it was at the hands of the Islamic movement that remains in power to this day. Our interventions continued into the 21st century; while unable to dislodge Iran’s government, we laid waste to two of its neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq. And last year, in a prelude to our latest war, we joined Israel in bombing Iran at the tail end of the 12-day war.

Yet, according to Hegseth, it is Iran that has waged a one-sided war on us. They’ve spilled “the blood of our people,” he said.

This rhetoric — which any self-respecting white nationalist would embrace — is not new to Hegseth. In 2015, Hegseth drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” the New Yorker reported, citing a complaint from a former employee of Hegseth’s organization at the time.

Hegseth was more restrained Monday morning. But actions speak louder than words, and in the opening hours of our attack on Iran, we (or Israel) bombed a girls’ elementary school, killing over 170 — which Hegseth didn’t bother to mention.

In a follow-up press briefing Wednesday morning, a BBC reporter pressed for details on the school bombing, but Hegseth would only say, “We're investigating that. We of course never target civilian targets.” (It’s alarming that Hegseth described slain Iranian kids not as “civilians,” but as “civilian targets,” tacking on an ominous descriptor.)

Hegseth was more in his element issuing threats and taunts. He sounds “more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense,” wrote Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols, who cautioned: “This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and it’s not some adolescent test of wills.”

The message has yet to sink in.

“Death and destruction from the sky — All. Day. Long,” Hegseth said Wednesday. “This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

This approach apparently involves targeting not only schools, but also hospitals, Al Jazeera reported. “Attacking a hospital is an attack on life,” wrote Masoud Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon and Iran’s president since 2024. “And attacking a school is an attack on a nation’s future.”

CNN reported that the US-Israeli campaign has also targeted Iranian police stations, while arming militias from the restive Kurdish minority — all in an attempt to overthrow the government, or at least spark civil war and anarchy.

Back at Monday’s press briefing, Hegseth fielded one last question: What is your prayer for US troops in harm’s way? Despite being a softball, Hegseth initially stumbled.

“First of all, my prayer for them is that I do pray for them,” he said. “My wife prays for them, our family prays for them, our Cabinet prays for them. None of this is done on a whim.”

Hegseth’s reply, while garbled, is pretty standard fare for US officials. Less standard is Hegseth’s brand of Christianity. His pastor Doug Wilson preaches, among other things, that women should be prohibited from voting, and Muslims barred from holding public office.

Rather than distance himself from such extremism, Hegseth invited Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist,” to lead a prayer session at the Pentagon last month, CNN reported.

Two weeks later, Hegseth worked with Israel to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a reportedly cancer-stricken, 86-year-old Muslim cleric with millions of followers around the world.

Now, the Middle East is on fire.

To be clear, Hegseth is just one cog in Trump’s fast-moving wheel. But he’s a worrying cog, especially as Trump appears increasingly desperate to keep his ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein out of headlines by waging wars.