President Donald Trump is so unpopular and afraid of protesters surrounding the White House that the parimeter had to be extended out with ugly fencing, which is now covered with BLM graffiti: By Glynn Wilson
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – When the patriotic winds blew me out of Washington all the way across the country to California a year ago last month, I thought I could escape the painful destruction of American democracy and the nation’s beautiful capital city and the global citadel of democracy at least to some extent.
The daily headlines of the apocalypse were getting me down, like many of my friends, fans and followers on social media.
As I’ve told new friends here of late, people in California seem to be able to ignore much of what goes on 3,000 miles and three time zones to the east. By the time we wake up in the morning and start reading the New York Times online, people in Eastern Time are already hard at it trying to make the federal government work.
In partnership with Jim and Nina Rhodes here, the plan was to ignore partisan politics on Yosemite Radio and focus on other news of more local and regional import.
But at heart I’m an American patriot who has covered government and politics for so long every failure breaks my heart over and over again, and this is no partisan rant. The Democrats are far from perfect. Republicans have been behind many of our failures during my lifetime, however, going all the way back to Nixon.
Trump is so over the top that just because he happens to be a Republican makes the party that supports him into a whole new criminal class. They should all be locked up in these private prisons they are so proud of building to house the Black and brown people they make no bones about hating. At least Reagan couched his language in Southern Strategy code to get white people in the South to vote for him. This MAGA bunch make America look more facsist than Nazi Germany. And that ain’t my definition of GREAT!
Why can’t we just make the government work so we can get on with our daily lives and the mission to simply go about exercising our rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, why does this have to be so freaking hard?
While even I have advocated spending less time on social media and paying less attention to the news for the mental health of my political news junkie friends, you can’t go through life like an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand all the time like the cartoon. Ignoring news completely will not make it go away. You will just be caught unaware when the next disaster strikes.
For the past year, it has been my policy to let the New York Times cover Trump’s transformation of Washington for the most part. I’ve shared the links on Facebook about him destroying the East Wing of the White House for a stupid over the top ballroom, his triumphal arch, destroying the National Mall Reflecting Pool, cutting down the cherry trees for a golf course, adorning the Oval Office with gold plated Walmart decorations and tearing up the Kennedy Center.
But now he’s messing with one of our most important parks, where I’ve spent many hours contemplating American freedom, and I can’t take it anymore.
It was back in the 1990s when I first sat on a bench by the White House in Lafayette Square, when things were so safe in this country that you could smoke a joint there and wave at Bill Clinton.
In 2004 and 2005, I used to ride a Cannondale mountain bike there from Virginia, or take it on the Metro, and feel like a real citizen in a country where “the people” mattered.
But during Trump’s first term, the park remained fenced off for months at a time, because the dictator-in-chief was so afraid of Black Lives Matter protesters, who had demonstrated over and over again that they understood the John Lewis and Martin Luther King philosophy of non-violent protest. America at its best.
In the summer before the election of 2020, I snapped a picture of the park that should have won an award. It ran on this editorial opinion column.
Not Since Nixon Has a President Been So Isolated and Hated: Trump Has to Go
In the summer of 2018 before the midterm elections that year, I was there when about 10,000 residents of D.C., Maryland and Virginia showed up (along with Antifa protesters) to face down 10 racist white guys from Virginia, who showed up flying Confederate and Nazi flags and had to be protected by the D.C. Metro cops and Trump’s Secret Service.
Anti-racist counterprotesters pack Lafayette Square as the DC Metro Police protect a small band of neo-Nazis by the White House: Glynn Wilson
White nationalist Jason Kessler holding a Confederate battle flag on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Sunday, June 25, 2017: Glynn Wilson
Neo-Nazis Vastly Outnumbered by Anti-Racist Protesters in DC Rally and March
This was a clear demonstration of democracy in action, as the anti-facsicst protesters chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.”
Anti-racist counterprotesters gathered in Freedom Plaza before marching to the White House, shown here with the Trump International Hotel clock tower in the background: Glynn Wilson
The Democrats took over control of the House that year, and in 2019, impeached Donald Trump the first time. Only Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate refused to vote to convict him and remove him from office.
The voters took him out in 2020, however, only he could not accept defeat and incited a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, motivating a mob to attack our nation’s capitol like nothing we have ever seen before. Even my Republican friends in the National Park Service turned against Trump then, saying this was going too far.
The Biden Justice Department tracked down and locked many of them up. But when Trump stole the 2024 election with Elon Musk’s help, he pardoned them all on day one.
So no, I will not apologize for voicing my rights as an American citizen and journalist to treat this administration like this is just politics as usual. There is no both sides to this story.
The New York Times is now coming under increasing criticism for treating it as such.
Substack columnist Margaret Sullivan just published a piece quoting an article in The New Republic on this subject.
A biting critique of the New York Times that may change what you read
In the New Republic last week, former Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon wrote a sweeping and perceptive piece that brought me new insight into the New York Times, which I’m a frequent critic of. (I’m the former public editor, or ombudswoman, of the Times, and since then, a media critic who often writes about the paper, both here on Substack and in my columns at the Guardian US.)
The headline of Bacon’s piece is provocative: “Liberals Must Fight the New York Times’ Monopoly Too.” So is the sub-headline: “The paper’s editorial vision is out of step with the robust liberalism needed today.”
Bacon, who left the Post in the opinion section’s heartbreaking talent purge, makes the case that the Times has a massive influence on liberals in America but that the attachment is problematic.
“The Times implicitly and at times explicitly advances a centrist, status quo politics, and that’s exactly what liberals must abandon to save the country.”
What’s needed at this moment, Bacon argues, is something quite different: “A liberalism that forcefully confronts authoritarianism, oligarchy, climate change, and the numerous other enormous challenges that we face…”
But because liberals are so deeply affected by, and tied to, the Times, that very attachment is harmful to their mission, he argues.
The Times believes deeply in the nonpartisan, non-ideological form of journalism that has dominated in the United States for the last eight decades or so, Bacon writes.
He goes on to state, correctly, that Times leaders describe their approach as being an “independent” news operation. “But the coverage of the Times is best described by other words and phrases: nonpartisan, bipartisan, centrist, neutral, a ‘view from nowhere,’ and, at its worst, false equivalence.”
This lends itself to many of the practices that I’ve complained about here. Yes, this includes false equivalence, or “both-sidesing” — in which unequal positions are neatly equated. Or the soft-pedaling of what’s really happening by avoiding describing the Trump-era Republican Party, in Bacon’s words, “as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist and plutocratic.”
“The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right.”
And then Bacon winds up a big punch: “The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy.”
He goes on, including to take on the opinion section, and describes the much criticized Ezra Klein column titled, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” as emblematic of what’s wrong there.
Bacon’s piece is worth a read.
Liberals Must Fight The New York Times’ Monopoly Too
This is my published comment on the Sullivan piece.
Back in 2007 when I went to New York on an Nation Institute Investigative Fund grant trip, after I had freelanced for the Times from 2002-2005 but got lost in the Jason Blair/Judi Miller scandal shuffle that brought down Howell Raines, the editorial writer who had been the copy editor who handled most of the stories I worked on (and gave me a few bylines then) took me on a tour of the new Times building. In a bar in the neighborhood, I ended up drinking with and talking to a long time art critic at the Times. I had gone independent on the web in 2005, competed with the likes of Raw Story in Washington before Allbrighten started Politico in 2007 (now back with The Washington Sun). I had similar criticisms of the Times management then, both news and financial decisions. He just laughed and said, “You must understand. The Times IS the ESTABLISHMENT, man.”
In journalism school back in the 1980s, we were taught it was the “national newspaper of record,” read by international leaders as well, including the Russians. In grad school in the 1990s, we used the Times for media effects research, and in a master’s thesis, I actually proved what Perry Bacon says he can’t prove: that the Times influences other media coverage and public opinion. One conservative anonymous academic critic actually took umbrage at my characterization of the NYT as the newspaper of record in a review of one of my academic journal articles.
For years I said we could do it better on the web, and I did for 20 years and survived, covering more beats than any single news reporter in American journalism history. But we never got up enough financial steam to compete with all the mainstream sensationalism or blogging clickbait. CNN was ruined after Time Inc. kicked Ted Turner off the board.
And now we must compete with A.I. bots?
I enjoy your criticism Margaret. But I am now semi-retired and living in California, still writing a syndicated column covering politics and writing about A.I. and trying to promote altruism vs. the selfish gene. Keep up the good work, but unless something changes in the midterms, I’m afraid all may be lost for American democracy forever. Cover that.
American Democracy On the Line in Midterm Elections
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