Good morning readers.
Here’s a quick advertisement for independent media.
No link. Can you guess the outlet from the font alone? If so, this advertisement likely requires no further explanation.
Okay, here’s another:
Screengrab taken from Threads. Can you identify the outlet? Drop your guesses in the comment thread, but only if you can restrain yourself from cheating.
Needless to say, people who get their news from desks that think in bothsides and stenography will not be well-informed in the years ahead.
Moving on! A few prompts for this week’s AMA follow below.
Trump’s cabinet/sub-cabinet drama continues. Pete Hegseth has had to call in his mommy (yes, literally) to help him whip support for his failing defense secretary nomination. The pitch appears to also include a promise, pinky swear, to quit drinking before taking the job?
Hegseth could withdraw by the time we chat this afternoon; Trump already had to pull his first attorney general nominee. The alternatives are obviously not great (Trump is a Republican) but those developments give me some confidence that, e.g., he won’t be to install Kash Patel at the FBI.
The more troubling thing to me is where he’s getting no pushback: Trump is just casually announcing nominees to fill positions that aren’t open, and are designed not to be open, so that incoming presidents can’t politicize them. FBI is one. IRS is another. We know Trump wants to install cronies at the Federal Reserve. He’s faced some resistance to the specific people he wants to install in those jobs, but basically none (not from Dems, not from Republicans, not from mainstream media) for announcing his intent to fire people he’s legally not supposed to fire. Suboptimal!
South Korea put down a coup attempt so quickly that some South Koreans slept through the whole thing. None of this months of buildup then years of dithering over consequences nonsense. Ah well, next time maybe…
Patrick Soon-Shiong’s quest to turn the Los Angeles Times into a small dystopia continues.
The (apparently) targeted killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York this week—hoooo! This story has driven a bunch of weird and bad discourse for obvious reasons. But I think one non-obvious reason is that, for now, everyone’s left to their imagination. The range of possible backstories and motives here is nuts. People (not just true-crime junkies) are riveted, and it’s making them use their outside voices.
What are you all kicking around in your heads? Let me know below, unless you prefer the live chat. 2 p.m. ET.
ALRIGHT let’s chat…
