Maybe You Should Shout Fire in a Crowded Theater (If It's On Fire): The Coup Continues

Yesterday the Associated Press ran a story with this sentence in it: "Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee." That sentence came a little after after the opening sentence which declared that Musk and Trump were moving "to cut down on office space." So far as I can tell this means largely eliminating the federal government--for example the federal government has in my region (California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, some Pacific US territories) 170 government-owned buildings and leased space in 827 buildings. Meanwhile the difference between reducing and eliminating all the leased space seems more or less like the difference between a haircut and the guillotine. And the story, which seemed clear to me if not the AP, clarifies that Musk's apparent goal isn't to reduce the size of the federal government; it's to eliminate it. Especially if you relate it to all the other stories out there about what Musk is doing, though there's often a notion in mainstream journalism that connecting things to other things is editorializing, that the audience should be delivered facts stripped of context in the name of objectivity. 

Other evidence for this is in Musk's recent declaration “Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.” News also came in that the executive branch offered buyouts to everyone at the CIA, is trying to fire most of the FBI, and shut down NOAA, whose website was down last night but up this morning (NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is also a branch of US intelligence, about nature). Just to reiterate what some of us have been saying since Monday the 27th, this is a coup and it's illegal: the administrative branch in the form of Musk is attempting to dismantle huge parts of the federal government and to exercise powers not granted to it in the Constitution in ways that also sweep aside the legislative and judicial branches of government. The order to terminate all those federal building leases was being given by an employee of Musk's formerly at Twitter/X; it seems likely that, legally, she doesn't have that power.

There are many causes for the current political crisis in the USA, and I would never downplay the racism and misogyny that led to support for a white nationalist/ fascist administration. But another factor that deserves more attention is the misinformation and disinformation that come at us from (almost) all directions, so that a lot of Americans are misinformed (and others are just uninformed, but there's room to be a combination of those two factors, and studies after the November election showed that the more misinformed voters were about immigration, crime and the economy, the more likely they were to vote for Trump). The impact of right-wing media, especially Fox, has been much discussed, but there are two other colossal problems--and one of them, the Internet, has been likewise addressed and reviled a fair amount. But that mainstream media itself so sedates and misleads its readers is, in my eyes, a huge factor in how we got here and a huge hindrance in how we get out. 

That AP story I started with--it's like so many stories we've seen about all things Trump with, maybe, the exception of January 6th coverage: it plays down the criminality and the impact of what's he and his goons are doing. Just like during the campaign, the mainstream media played down Trump's cognitive derangement, his bizarre statements, his ignorance, his criminality, and the consequences of what he was threatening to do. Which is a reminder that nothing happening, including the intent to execute the 2025 agenda and yesterday's proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza, is a surprise; this was all out in the open before the election, but delivered like the story about defenestrating the federal government in terms that were bland, mild, soft, a little boring. 

We're in the worst crisis in the history of this country--during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln was in the White House and while a bunch of states seceded and started a war, the danger as I understand was that the US would lose some of its territory, not that it would cease to be a democratic republic and shred the Constitution, which is what's going on now. But the newspapers (I don't watch TV news, but I imagine much of it is similar or worse) have been framing this as a slightly boring bureaucratic business since January 27th, when the Administration in an evening order attempted to stop almost all federal spending. This threatened a huge number of programs on which people's lives literally depend and much else that keeps not just this nation but this world running, but the stories didn't convey this, and the drama of how that order was rescinded  has also received little attention.  

A longtime AIDS activist called me up last week, on the edge of tears about what cutting off US programs supplying AIDS-related medicines in Africa would mean--a lot of deaths and the potential mutation of the disease into new forms--but the impact of these cuts has likewise been delivered in bland language. Here in the US, defunding government programs will have an immediate impact on people dependent on those programs for medical care or the money and services that make their lives possible, but likewise the utter destruction these vulnerable populations face seems hardly apparent in the mainstream news I see. What's the impact of shutting down USAID? We could use some more stories on that too.

I often get the impression that mainstream media is more concerned with presenting itself as calm and evenhanded than accurately representing reality. Thus the attempts to equate things that are not equivalent when it comes to Democrats and Republicans, to downplay the outrageousness and impact of right-wing policies and the climate emergency, to repeat lies when said by powerful people without the context demonstrating that they're lies. Thus the attempt to downplay crises, to normalize not just criminal acts but reality itself. Brian Montopoli, a former CBS reporter and MSNBC producer, confirms this today in a guest editorial at Anand Giridharadas's (highly recommended) newsletter the Ink, writing "But the top brass largely believed that maintaining credibility (and reaching the broadest possible audience) meant appearing politically neutral; we were expected to be equally critical of both sides, regardless of whether they actually deserved equal criticism. As a result, there was tremendous pressure not to make big, bold statements, no matter how much the moment might demand it. Instead, we were expected to cover each new outrage in a vacuum — and never, ever put the pieces together."

There's an old adage that gave this essay its title, to the effect that you shouldn't shout fire in a crowded theater. But if the theater is on fire someone should raise the alarm. The don't shout fire business might also be premised on the idea that people will panic--as I was saying in yesterday's newsletter, there are a lot of wrong assumptions about human nature that impact how decisions are made by elites. The idea that people will panic and trample each other in an emergency is largely untrue, even of the evacuation of the World Trade Center towers during 9/11, during which no one shoved or freaked; they helped one another--co-workers, total strangers--get down the staircases and out of the way of the collapsing buildings. But the idea we will panic has been used as a justification for keeping the public in the dark--it's more or less the idea we're sheep and shepherds should make the decisions for us. 

So who's shouting fire in this theater with the flames licking up the walls? We have a brilliant, brave, and truth-telling media still, but it's not the mainstream. It's the smaller publications. Right now the New Republic, Rolling Stone, and Wired are among the actual magazines doing the job of reporting the truth without minimizing the threats. And so many newsletters launched in the last few years are likewise doing this work--Heather Cox Richardson's is of course the best known and has the largest audience (one that if the numbers I read are right put her online readership not that far behind the Washington Post's), but a host of journalists and media critics, many of them formerly with larger media outlets. It was an independent journalist, Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, who got the leaked document on the evening of Monday, January 27th, showing the intention to cut off all those federal funds, in violation of the Constitution. She immediately shared the information on BlueSky, where a lot of other people (including me) picked up on it and amplified it. The newspapers reported it the next morning, but in their usual sedative way. They're still downplaying what's going on.

There should be headlines the size of their headlines on January 6th or 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, because we're actually facing a far more dangerous threat than we were on any of those days. This morning, I did a search for the word coup on the digital front pages of the Washington Post, New York Times, and, I regret to say, the Guardian and the search brought me to two features with the word "couple" in them but no stories with the word "coup." Democrats in Congress were part of a huge, fierce protest in front of the US Treasury, inside which Musk's little army have been rewriting the code that controls federal funds and generally sabotaging the system, but this morning I saw no reports about it on those front pages.

 Here's how the great law journalists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate put it yesterday, "The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump’s blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk’s team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress’ explicit command."

Here's Anand Giridharadas on Musk: " What Musk is doing right now, along with Donald Trump—but also usurping Trump’s at least elected authority—is waging a coup against the Constitution of the United States. Undermining the basic distribution of power within the American constitutional order." 

When the theater is on fire, look for people who are willing to say the word fire, point out the flames, and use the fire extinguishers. 

p.s. I had been thinking about launching a newsletter for a long time before I launched this one three days ago. I don't intend it to always be about this catastrophic crisis, or to write every day--but we're in that crisis now, and there's a lot to say about it.

p.p.s. A word about social media: it's popular to deplore getting your news from it, with the assumption that we're all suckers slurping up conspiracy theories with the cat pictures. But you choose your diet there. I've long followed some of the smartest, most informed, and sometimes most expert people in the country--political figures like AOC (who often does long monologues on Instagram that are immensely valuable) and Jamie Raskin, activists and organizers, legal experts like Lawrence Tribe, media critics, climate scientists like Katharine Hayhoe and Michael Mann, feminists, voices from abroad, human rights activists.... Of course, the corporations that own and control these sites have their own agenda, which often includes suppressing some kinds of information and promoting others--Youtube is notorious for pushing extremist content, for example. These are not neutral spaces (BlueSky aside), but they are ones we can navigate if we have the skill to sort through the menu of truth and lies (X is now such a hate-and-lies site I'm one of the millions who've left it, but Facebook remains both useful and problematic). And for me they're useful up-to-the-moment sources of information, desperately needed in this moment, as well as a place I can relay information. It's also worth remembering that Google (which owns Youtube) in particular and the Internet in general siphoned off advertising income from newspapers, which has played a role in many of them reducing their staff or shutting down altogether. It's one of the ways Silicon Valley has made this country more vulnerable and misinformed while also creating space for unprecedented waves of misinformation, cult-building, and right-wing recruitment. It not a coincidence that a lot of tech oligarchs and Trump are the same team right now.