The Washington Post (8/5/26) wrote that El-Sayed “carries heavy baggage into the general election”—and cited four policy positions that are all supported by a majority of voters.

It’s sad commentary on US media when two national newspapers, historically representing different poles of the American establishment, appear to share editorial writers. When it comes to the nomination of progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, the Washington Post (8/5/26) and Wall Street Journal (8/5/26) editorial boards practically plagiarized each other. It’s further testament that the Post is no longer known as the paper that took down Richard Nixon; rather, it’s a mouthpiece for the oligarchy that has very much taken the side of the current administration. 

Both papers fear that El-Sayed’s victory is another notch in the wave of victories by the left: Zohran Mamdani taking the New York City mayoralty last year, the Democratic Socialists of America primary victories in June, and now El-Sayed—who is not a DSA candidate but who is, as the Cold Warriors might call him, a fellow traveller.

‘Radical views’

Just look at how both boards reject the idea that El-Sayed distances himself from the organized socialist movement, with the Journal condemning his “radical views” and the Post bemoaning his “heavy baggage.”

The Post:

While El-Sayed rejects the “socialist” label, he campaigned on Medicare-for-all, opposition to Israel, raising taxes on the wealthy and abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Journal:

He continues to support Medicare for All. He favors a wealth tax and an enormous expansion in federal entitlements for child care and more. He wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying the agency “is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.”… Mr. El-Sayed wants to cut off all US military aid to Israel, which he accuses of genocide in Gaza.

Editorialists might not like these ideas, but it is clear voters do. Both government-assured healthcare (WITI, 12/14/25) and taxing the wealthy (Pew Research, 3/19/25) are supported by large majorities. And they’re not minor concerns. From KFF (7/16/26): 

Healthcare costs top the list of voters’ healthcare priorities for the midterm elections, with half (51%) of all voters and more than half of Democratic (60%) and independent (55%) voters saying the issue is extremely important for candidates to talk about.

It doesn’t cross the minds of those in Beltway and Manhattan media bubbles that Michiganders are well-acquainted with their neighbors in Canada who, like those living in many other industrialized democracies, enjoy universal healthcare.

The papers also forget some history. Single-payer health insurance is far from a radical idea: A bipartisan group of senators in 1970, with some support from the Nixon administration, explored “national health insurance, a plan to cover the medical needs and costs of all Americans” (New York Times, 9/22/70). Health reform’s champion at the time, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), “wanted the government to be the nation’s single-payer for healthcare” (WBUR, 8/25/20). If anything, El-Sayed and his supporters are channeling the party’s former glory on this, rather than importing some fringe ideology.

Mainstream positions

To the Wall Street Journal (8/5/26), El-Sayed is an “articulate” man “with radical views” who should “maybe hold off on French Revolution 2.0.” 

Trump’s brutal war against immigrants polls horribly (YouGov, 7/21/26; The Hill, 8/3/26). From YouGov (3/3/26): 

Support for abolishing ICE has hit a new high in this week’s Economist/YouGov poll. Half (50%) of Americans now somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. Only 39% oppose abolishing the agency.

El-Sayed believes ICE is “about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets”? Anyone who has paid attention to what has happened in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles this last year knows that this is an accurate assessment.

“Opposition to Israel” is also a mainstream position. More Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, according to Gallup (2/27/26), and 62% have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government (Pew, 7/9/26). From Al Jazeera (5/21/26): 

A new poll from the New York Times/Siena has found that nearly three-quarters of voters aligned with the Democratic Party oppose US military aid to Israel, up from 45% three years ago. 

That Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is the consensus view of global human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, as well as the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry.

That both papers think these moderate positions are “out there” shows that someone here is out of touch, but it’s not the Democratic primary voters of Michigan.

‘Path out of the wilderness’

According to AP (7/19/26), AIPAC spent $30 million on Stevens’ campaign. Her total dark-money haul reached some $60 million total, compared to El-Sayed’s $3.5 million. El-Sayed outraised Stevens in individual donations, $14.5 million to $11.9 million (Al Jazeera, 8/2/26).

Then, both papers worry that Trump’s disastrous reign could allow voters to elect a man like El-Sayed, or that he could be so distasteful to the independents of Michigan that he could keep the Senate in Republican hands next year. The Post:

Trump is so unpopular right now, and the national environment is so favorable for Democrats, that El-Sayed might win despite himself. If he loses, and the GOP controls the Senate for the last two years of Trump’s term as a result, it could teach Democrats an important lesson heading into 2028. Pragmatism, not radicalism, offers the best path out of the wilderness.

The Journal:

Mr. El-Sayed is counting on anti-Donald Trump fury to unite Democrats despite his radical views…. Nominating a leftist could cost the party a Senate majority that is very much in reach. If [Republican Senate nominee Mike] Rogers wins, one lesson will be that Mr. El-Sayed was too far left to win in a swing state even in what is likely to be an excellent Democratic year. Democrats might rethink this year’s headlong rush left as they consider the 2028 presidential race.

Once again, the prose here is so similar that it makes one wonder why we must suffer through multiple newspapers at all—it’s like Walmart and Whole Foods, conservative and liberal-coded respectively, selling the same parasite-infected lettuce.

The Michigan primary race was notable for a huge amount of pro-Israel spending meant to stop El-Sayed—an attempted repeat of the lobby’s successful defeat of New York DSA congressmember Jamaal Bowman two years ago (FAIR.org, 6/28/24). As the AP (7/19/26) reported, AIPAC and “its affiliated groups have spent close to $30 million backing” El-Sayed’s opponent Congresswoman Haley Stevens, “their largest investment ever in a single race.”

For what it’s worth, Al Jazeera’s calculation (8/2/26) was more damning: 

Federal Election Commission records show that AIPAC and other political action committees have spent more than $54 million to help Stevens. A dark-money group called the Center for Democratic Priorities has also spent about $6.5 million on ads supporting Stevens, according to local media reports—increasing the grand total to more than $60 million.

That’s actually the one notable difference between the two editorials: The Journal at least mentioned AIPAC’s heavy spending, while the Post did not. There was a time, before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos turned the Post ideologically toward the Trump administration (New Republic, 11/3/25), when the paper regularly attacked the influence of big money in American elections (Washington Post, 1/9/12, 4/22/12, 2/4/14, 10/12/14, 1/20/20). Times change.

The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, didn’t publicly endorse Stevens, but reportedly pushed donors toward her campaign (New York Times, 6/5/26). She also had the backing of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Former President Barack Obama didn’t publicly endorse Stevens, but “AIPAC-linked” supporters “spent $5 million airing an advertisement nearly 4,000 times that features Obama praising her work as chief of staff for the US Auto Rescue Task Force during the 2008 financial crisis” (CNN, 7/17/26), giving the impression that he was behind her.

If by “Democrats” the papers mean party leadership, the top brass already chose Stevens–they don’t need any editorial encouragement to avoid the progressive option.

Beltway Risk

AP‘s headline (7/9/26) didn’t age well.

But if the editorials, when they admonished “Democrats,” meant the everyday people who chose El-Sayed, then they’re making a clear case against voters having small-d democratic agency. No, little voters in Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, you can’t vote for what you believe is best for your job, health and bank account. You have to assume other people (who are in much the same boat as you) are going to vote against their interests–and vote the way they would.

Voters have been told repeatedly that the only way to counter the extreme rise of MAGA is to forgo socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders and opt for establishment centrists like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris (Mother Jones, 12/16/16; Fox Business, 2/24/20; FAIR.org, 10/25/25). Certainly, in the last 10 years, the Republican base’s move from the old guard to more radical ideas haven’t hampered the party’s results at the ballot box. After these Democratic leadership failures to win power, maybe voters are interested in a different strategy.

Not only did the editorial boards not acknowledge that El-Sayed’s platform of single-payer healthcare and taxing the rich was appealing to voting people, they could not admit that the centrist politics they push as an alternative were a turnoff.  Stevens’ enormous corporate warchest couldn’t make up for the fact that people, as one voter put it (AP, 7/9/26), “don’t want a moderate,” and instead “want somebody who’s going to come in and effect change.” 

In other words, for the Post and Journal editorial boards, politics and voting aren’t about how people express themselves and their needs and interests. Rather, they’re an ongoing game of Beltway Risk, in which the needs and views of living, breathing people are just pieces on a board. 

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CT Mirror (7/30/26)

This week on CounterSpin: If you look for media coverage about the Farm Bill that’s currently passing through Congress, you can find it–at sites like agriculture.com or agri-pulse.com, or those outlets that have “ag” sections. If you look for coverage of SNAP, the largest food assistance program in the country, you can find that lots of other places. And while some of those headlines are about “Deadbeat Parents” and “SNAP Fraud,” these days many more say things like “Nearly 19K State Kids Have Lost SNAP Benefits Over Past Year” (that’s Connecticut) or “Illinois Launches New Program to Provide Food Benefits to People Who Lost SNAP,” or “Small Grocery Stores Cutting Inventory, Considering Layoffs as SNAP Dollars Decline.”

Overwhelmingly, local reporters are documenting how cuts to SNAP are hurting people and communities. But the lack of major media stories linking the program to the Farm Bill seem somehow emblematic of the opacity around this country’s lawmaking on critical questions around food.

We get an update from Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center.

Also on the show: People who rely on food benefits programs have long been a punching bag for both right-wing ideologues and their corporate media enablers. Claiming people working full time jobs that don’t provide enough to feed their families are really just grifters living high on your dime is a time-honored tactic, no matter how far it falls afield of reality. We talked about that last year with the president of Food Research & Action Center, Crystal FitzSimons; we add a little of that conversation as well.

As a result of US-imposed sanctions, UN News (6/8/26) reported, “infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85% to 65%; and essential medicines are available at only around 30% of normal supply levels.”

The energy blockade that the Trump administration has imposed on Cuba is hammering the island. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk (UN News, 6/8/26) recently pointed out:

The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable. Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines…. These sanctions must be lifted immediately.

Broad swaths of the US media’s chattering class have taken a different angle, suggesting that the Cuban government is the primary—if not the sole—cause of the pain being inflicted on the country. The function of such propaganda is to justify the US’s economic warfare: If the Cuban government can’t run the country, the logic goes, then the US is right to try and bring it down.

It’s the same narrative pushed by US officials and Cubans in exile, who together constitute the large majority of sources in news coverage of Cuba from prominent US outlets, as a recent FAIR study (7/15/26) showed.

Much of the US commentariat is also pretending that the Cuban revolution’s extraordinary achievements have not occurred. Acknowledging them would, of course, get in the way of the narrative that Cuban leaders are so malign and incompetent that the US is obligated to bring about a counter revolution.

‘A golden opportunity’

The Wall Street Journal (7/12/26) compares Cuba’s government to South African apartheid—which Cuba opposed, and the Journal supported.

At times, the punditry is explicit in its support for regime change in Cuba. In the Wall Street Journal (7/12/26), Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote:

Once South Africa ceased to be a Cold War pawn, the economic costs of sanctions imposed by countries across the globe broke the government’s resistance…. Cubans aren’t likely to escape tyranny without a similar leg up from the outside.

The South African apartheid analogy is absurd: Upon taking power, the Cuban revolution made fighting racial discrimination a priority (Black Perspectives, 3/8/16), and Cuba played a crucial part in supporting South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.

But what’s most relevant here is O’Grady’s suggestion that “the outside” is inflicting “the economic costs of sanctions” so that Cubans can “escape tyranny.” As Türk pointed out, this anti-“tyranny” plan involves killing children by depriving them of “access to essential medical supplies and medicines.”

The Washington Post’s editorial board (2/6/26) sounded impressed by the effects of Trump’s siege. “Washington’s pressure on Havana is working,” it wrote:

Cuba looks ready to implode. The island suffers from food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse. President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power has cut off the Cubans from what has historically been their main source of oil. Having successfully pressured the Mexican government to also slash oil supplies, Trump has effectively created a blockade that has brought the regime to its knees.

With such extraordinary leverage, it would be unwise to settle for anything less than dramatic change on America’s terms: economic, personal and political freedom for all Cubans.

The paper, in short, cheered the US blockade creating “food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse” so that Cuba would be forced to make “dramatic change on America’s terms.”

The editors’ assertions relied on a simplistic caricature of personal and political life in Cuba, and on what appears to be an assumption that their readers won’t notice that depriving people of food, energy and even minimal economic security—as the blockade does—also denies them economic and personal freedom. However, the more salient point is probably that the US has no right under the UN Charter to interfere in Cuba’s affairs, let alone to use food as a weapon to restore capitalism, which, as any conservative will tell you, is what “economic freedom” means.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post (2/11/26), former New York Times reporter Lizette Alvarez claimed that “Trump’s love of the deal and Cuba’s imminent collapse present a golden opportunity to finally drive meaningful change on the island.”

Even before the Trump administration intensified the energy blockade at the start of the year, as UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan (11/21/25) noted, the “golden opportunity” created by the embargo had resulted in “the widespread inaccessibility of 69% of medicines to Cubans, including medicine against cancer, heart diseases, repellents, tests for dengue and other infections.”

Alvarez contended that the US “could lift the embargo,” but that “Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel would have to agree to deadline-driven reforms,” including “eliminating restrictions that hamper private investment and business.” At no point did the author spell out why she believes that the US is entitled to “drive” change in Cuba, much less deprive Cubans of medicine until they allow “private investment and business” to operate unimpeded.

‘No ring of Navy warships’

USA Today‘s Judy Pino (3/10/26) argues that “freedom demands effort”—and by “effort,” she means the devastation of one’s economy by a neighboring superpower.

The US began to impose a blockade on Cuba in 1960 to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Rather than recognize such factors in Cuban suffering, many  voices in the corporate media have embraced the political and economic equivalent of flat Earthism.

For instance, Judy Pino (USA Today, 3/10/26) euphemistically referred to Trump’s aggression against Cuba as “pressure on the regime” and said that “daily life [in Cuba] shows the cost of [the Cuban government’s] repression and chronic mismanagement.” In 2018, the UN estimated that the embargo had cost Cuba’s economy $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18)—from a country whose entire GDP, according to the World Bank, is $107 billion—but Pino wrote as though that’s not a leading cause of the challenges Cubans are facing.

A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/9/26) wrote that US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz

took apart the claim that the US blocks Cuba’s access to world markets. “If there’s an embargo, a blockade, whatever name they want to put on it, how did humanitarian aid from Belize, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the European Union, Mexico, Spain, Russia, Uruguay and the UN itself reach the country just in the last few months?” Mr. Waltz asked. “There is no ring of Navy warships sitting around this island blocking trade or humanitarian aid going into Cuba. It’s fake. It’s false. It’s a lie. Period.”

Economic blockades don’t require naval encirclements, of course. The Journal gaslit its readers, denying US subversion and writing as if allowing smatterings of aid into Cuba to mitigate the effects of that subversion is the same as permitting Cuba to participate in the global economy.

‘Facts tell a different story’

The “illusion” that Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo (New York Times, 3/1/26) celebrates Cuba losing is the notion that it’s possible for a small Latin American country to choose an economic system that Washington disapproves of.

O’Grady (Wall Street Journal, 6/21/26) wrote that “the [Cuban] dictatorship’s excuse for the widespread misery is the same as it ever was: Washington’s Cuba policy. The facts tell a different story.”

The US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has marshaled quite a few facts that refute O’Grady’s view. CEPR (4/27/26) pointed out that, because the US tightened the embargo during Trump’s first term and the Biden government did next to nothing to ease it, Cuban medical importers have been unable

to obtain at affordable prices many basic medical supplies, such as syringes, inhalers, and even saline solution; more sophisticated medical equipment, such as imaging and ultrasound systems; and inputs for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. The redesignation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 2021 has made it extremely challenging to obtain financing for the purchase of these goods—at any price—or to simply execute international payments to purchase them. The end result of these multiple barriers generated by these sanctions has been massive shortages of medical goods— supplies, equipment, medicines.

Thus, CEPR concluded that “the primary cause” of an

unprecedented rise in Cuba’s [infant mortality rate], and the crisis in its once robust health care system, is almost certainly the hardening of US sanctions that began in 2017 and increased steadily in the years thereafter, with only a minor easing during the Biden administration.

In the New York Times (3/1/26), economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo asserted that

the [Cuban] leadership prioritizes political control over the needs of the population. The Cuban economy has suffered greatly for it. The country is no longer capable of producing the basic goods it needs; today it imports most of the food it consumes, despite the fertility of its lands and its long agricultural tradition.

This view ignores US sabotage, a rather significant factor. For instance, a team of UN Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts pointed out that the US’s groundless decision to classify Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” worsens problems in Cuba’s agricultural production

by exerting directly or indirectly more pressure on States and businesses trading with Cuba. In particular, access from abroad to agricultural inputs, including fertilisers, is almost completely blocked, as is the case for spare parts for the maintenance or repair of agricultural machinery and infrastructure.

Thus, the American “leadership prioritizes political control [of Cuba] over the needs of the [Cuban] population.”

Erasing Cuba’s accomplishments

The Washington Post (2/6/26) mocks the idea that the Cuban government wants to be “treated as an equal” in negotiating with the United States.

Corporate media outlets rarely admit that Cuban socialism achieved a great deal despite US aggression.

The Washington Post (2/6/26) argued that Cuba’s “67-year experiment with Communism has been an abject failure.” Consider the most recent rankings from the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which measures long-term progress in three key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Based on 2023 data, Cuba was classified as having a high level of human development and ranked 97th out of 193 countries and territories. While conditions in Cuba appear to have deteriorated since the US enacted the oil blockade earlier this year, faring well on the HDI very recently makes clear that it’s absurd to say that Cuba’s last 67 years have been nothing but an “abject failure.”

Alvarez (Washington Post, 2/11/26) said Cuba has an “unworkable Communist economic system.” But it wasn’t long ago that Cuba had the same rate of infant mortality as Canada, and a better one than the United States. That suggests that it’s the US that has an unworkable capitalist economic system, particularly when one considers that Cuba successfully cared for its infants under the US embargo, and the US itself faced no such aggression.

George Will of the Post (6/24/26) claimed that “the only good [Communist Cuba’s] evil ever produced” is the memoir of Armando Valladares, an opponent of Fidel Castro’s government who later served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

For Will, it seems, it was “evil” to provide vital support to Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan after devastating earthquakes hit each of these countries (Al Jazeera, 2/16/10). It was “evil” to fight Ebola in West Africa (Time, 11/5/14) and Covid-19 in Italy (Reuters, 3/22/20) at the peak of the pandemic nightmare. Helping liberate Angola, Namibia and South Africa from colonialism, imperialism and apartheid (Warscapes, 4/11/16; Jacobin, 5/20/22)? That’s “evil” too, apparently.

‘Disastrous policies of the socialist experiment’

Roberto González (Wall Street Journal, 7/7/26) presents the fact that “lights are out across much of the island”—as a result of direct intervention by the US government to destroy Cuba’s energy system—as proof that “the market works.”

In the Wall Street Journal (7/7/26), Roberto González declared, “For more than six decades, Cuba has been one of the few places on Earth where the disastrous economic policies of the socialist experiment persisted.” Yet in Subalternity vs. Hegemony: Cuba’s Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959–2014 (Springer, 2016), the scholars Angelo Baracca and Rosella Franconi noted that

the Cuban government had an unusual level of commitment to scientific and technological development, and a long-term vision to support health biotechnology, despite difficult economic conditions.

Through the “crusade the [Cuban] government has carried out in favor of more education and scientific research,” the country had developed “innovative, world-class products,” Barracca and Franconi noted. By 2018, Cuba held 1,200 international biopharmaceutical patents, and sold medicine and equipment to more than 50 countries (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 3/5/18). But there’s no room for such non-disasters in Gonzalez’s narrative.

It’s easy to tell that none of these commentators sincerely wanted Cubans to overcome the challenges they’re facing. If they did, they’d call for the simplest way to quickly enable the country to build on its past successes. That, to state the painfully obvious, is to end both Trump’s energy blockade and the longer-term embargo.

Instead, they stuck to a cruel, reactionary script: simultaneously gloss over the misery that the US is subjecting Cuba to, and all the good that Cuba has done for itself and the world, to create the impression that Cuba needs to be liberated by its US torturers.

Somehow the New York Post (7/30/26) didn’t find it as shocking when Donald Trump took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times during an investigation into fraudulent business practices.

The congressional grilling of former White House Covid advisor Anthony Fauci, and the resulting editorial responses, weren’t good faith inquiries into the pandemic (CNN, 7/29/26). The entire spectacle was a Republican public relations campaign to promote two often contradictory conspiracy theories.

The first is that the virus that ravaged the globe was a human-altered super virus that escaped a Chinese laboratory, which for right-wingers spins a titillating narrative of scientistic hubris fused with Communist treachery.

The second is that the public health measures that discouraged public gatherings were extreme and unnecessary. The idea is that the virus was not as dangerous as it was made out to be—just some sniffles and coughs, really—and that these countermeasures were meant to tank the economy, helping the Democrats win the presidency in November 2020. For the tinfoil hat wing of American politics, safety measures were less about saving Americans and more about fomenting a color revolution against President Donald Trump.

The right manages to at the same time be feverishly obsessed with the supposedly artificial release of the virus and also outraged by public health measures to contain it.

The hearing was all show and no trial, but right-wing pundits and politicians are doing their damndest to keep the hearing in the news cycle (Fox News, 8/5/26; Wall Street Journal, 8/5/26; Breitbart, 8/5/26). And the Republicans do need a distraction: Gas prices remain high (AP, 7/20/26), support for Trump’s war against Iran remains low (Quinnipiac, 7/29/26) and, as Newsweek (8/2/26) noted, his

approval rating is underwater in at least 11 states that he carried by double digits in the 2024 election, a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the president’s performance ahead of November’s midterms.

Centrist media are also keeping the persecuting viewpoint of Republican Sen. Rand Paul—who led the hearing, and might better serve the public by telling whether the other Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, is alive or not—in the public eye.

‘Manufacturing a false narrative’

The New York Post (7/28/26) claimed that Fauci’s “private notes contradict what he was telling the world at the very same time.” Private notes (1/26/20): “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” What he was telling the world (USA Today, 2/17/20): “Almost certainly, somewhere, somehow a bat infected an intermediate host who infected a human. What epidemiologists feel is that the market was an amplifier of something that was already going on.” (Fauci was referring to the latest research at the time about the Wuhan outbreak—work that was later superseded.)

The New York Post editorial board (7/28/26) focused on the lab leak theory:

For starters, [Fauci] insisted time and again that the “lab leak hypothesis” was a wacky conspiracy theory, that the virus had jumped naturally from animals to humans, presumably at the “wet market” in Wuhan, China.

Yet the diaries reveal that he knew early on that it had not come from the wet market, and was confronted with scientists he’d selected who argued with strong evidence that “lab leak” was the truth—and that the bug was likely bio-engineered in the Wuhan Institute Virology.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle (8/2/26), who has long leaned into the lab leak conspiracy, highlighted that Fauci’s diary described “meetings where eminent experts deemed a lab-leak origin for Covid possible.” McArdle disputed the value of attacking Fauci as an individual as counterproductive, because it ignores the “systemic” problems with the pandemic response:

Many of the powerful and influential really did become dogmatic on all things pandemic, from the origins of the virus to the merits of public gatherings to the benefits of mandatory vaccination.

USA Today’s Nicole Russell (7/29/26) likewise merged the origin-coverup and unnecessary mandates storylines:

Fauci’s silence may be legally prudent, but his poor decision-making has already been proven: While millions of Americans suffered from Covid-19 or the lockdowns he advised the Trump administration to mandate, Fauci was manufacturing a false narrative about the disease’s origins and reveling in the media attention it brought him.

‘Preponderance of scientific evidence’

As FAIR (6/28/21) reported five years ago, “Most scientists currently think that Covid-19 has a natural origin, because there is a well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to most disease outbreaks.”

The lab leak fixation is one our readers know well. As editor Jim Naureckas (Facebook, 7/31/26) said, “FAIR has looked intensively at the evidence offered for the lab leak theory, and each time we’ve found that there’s no there there”—pointing to several in-depth investigations (FAIR.org, 10/6/20, 6/28/21, 8/5/21, 4/7/23, 7/3/24, 4/18/25).

Soon after the pathogen emerged, a Nature paper (3/17/20) observed that, based on the characteristics of the virus, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV–like coronavirus.” Nothing has emerged in the years since to cast serious doubt on that conclusion.

The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” The World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (7/27/25) concluded that “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”

NPR (7/29/26) reported that

a 2024 study in the peer-reviewed journal Cell found multiple lines of evidence showing the virus spilled over from wild animals to humans…. The analysis shows with unprecedented granularity that coronavirus-susceptible wildlife and the SARS-CoV-2 virus were mingling, along with human beings, in a very specific part of the wet market in Wuhan.

While there is substantial agreement among scientists about the likelihood of a natural origin for the pandemic (Science, 2/6/24), the lab leak hypothesis remains a classic zombie idea, persistently resistant to being debunked out of rational society. In part this is due to the interest in maintaining it from foreign state media (AP, 2/15/21), intelligence services (BBC, 1/25/25)—and right-wing politicians.

‘Removes critical context’

The Wall Street Journal‘s Jack Butler (7/29/26) described Fauci as “the man who became the face of elite overreaction to the pandemic.”

Senator Paul, ever the showman, portrayed Fauci’s unearthed diary entries as proof that his public statements dismissing a “lab leak” contradicted his own personal beliefs. The New York Post (7/28/26) and others repeat that line, but it isn’t accurate. FactCheck.org (7/31/26) noted that Paul’s performance

removes critical context for Fauci’s statements and falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market, that it couldn’t have had a natural origin. It also treats Fauci’s diary statement as an immutable fact, when in reality, it was an interpretation of the information that was known at the time….

Fauci was clear in his diary that this did not change his opinion that the outbreak had a natural origin. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” he wrote.

And contrary to Paul’s insinuations—picked up by media like Wall Street Journal deputy editor Jack Butler (7/29/26), who said the revelations about Fauci “provide evidence of deliberate deception”—what Fauci said in his diary is pretty much what he was saying in real time. “Fauci publicly used almost the same wording a few weeks later in an interview with USA Today,” AP (7/29/26) noted.

‘Both onerous and performative’

The Wall Street Journal (7/29/26) complained of “media censorship” of the Great Barrington Declaration, which encouraged “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection.” Between 2020 and 2023, Covid killed nearly 278,000 Americans under the age of 65, according to the CDC.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/29/26) focused on the notion that America’s Covid response was overkill and that Fauci tried to cover this up:

Sen. Paul deserves credit for digging into the truth about the government’s destructive Covid response—especially the effort by Dr. Fauci and others to stifle dissenting views and hide the record….

We know from previous disclosures that Drs. Fauci and [Francis] Collins tried to demean the authors of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that favored “focused protection” on the old and sick rather than wholesale lockdowns. The duo favored media censorship of those and other dissenting views.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (7/30/26) said:

I was prepared to cut Fauci and others in government a lot of slack in the first months of the pandemic, when the take-no-chances approach seemed like the safest course. But at some point many of the measures that he insisted were necessary—like the six-foot distance rule, or masking requirements that had no hope of consistent enforcement—felt both onerous and performative, and guaranteed to create a backlash.

The “Covid wasn’t that bad and we overreacted” line is something one can promote only with the help of revisionist thinking. Covid killed more than a million Americans. By the time the death toll hit the halfway mark in early 2021, more Americans had died “from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined” (New York Times, 2/21/21).

Let’s emphasize: That was one year. In one country. According to WHO (5/13/26):

Globally, an estimated 22.1 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic occurred from 2020 to 2023, roughly three times the 7.0 million deaths officially reported.

As many 23 million Americans have shown the symptoms of long Covid. One scholarly account (JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 6/2/22) “estimated that 3,583,100 [Covid] hospitalizations occurred in the United States from May 2020 through April 2021.”

‘Fear of polarization’

As this map from Lancet (4/16/22) shows, excess mortality in the first years of the pandemic varied by a factor of 100 or more from one country to another.

The United States didn’t have particularly onerous—or effective—quarantine policies, especially compared to countries like China (Democratization, 2/13/24) or New Zealand (Spinoff, 7/14/25). And while pundits love to mock masks, the best evidence we have suggests that those things worked. As Health Affairs (2/16/22) reported: “Masking mandates conferred benefit in reducing community case incidence during an early period of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Lockdowns, if you can call them that, were popular in America when the pandemic started. Citing a Kaiser poll from April 2020, KQED (4/23/20) reported that “a majority of Americans—8 in 10—say strict shelter-in-place guidelines are worth it, to keep people safe from Covid-19 and control the spread of the virus.” And such measures didn’t stay in place long; while 40 states issued stay-at-home orders in April 2020, “all but one state lifted them by the end of June,” noted the New York Times (6/28/23).

“We didn’t lockdown during the Delta and Omicron waves, despite their severity and contribution to overall deaths from the pandemic,” Gregg Gonsalves, professor of epidemiology at Yale University, told FAIR:

Delta and Omicron together account for roughly half of all US Covid deaths, even though they came after the original 2020 wave. Many of these deaths could have been avoided.

“It appears that out of a fear of polarization, some media are treating the idea that ‘Covid measures went too far’ as an acceptable middle ground,” said Lucky Tran, a science communicator in New York City who has been active with the People’s CDC. “Reporters and commentators should be more wary of repeating mistakes seen in climate coverage in the past by giving false-balance to bad-faith arguments.”

Tran also told FAIR:

US Covid commentary has largely ignored the success of other countries, which helps fuel the “Covid measures went too far” narrative. For instance, Australia and New Zealand, which implemented stronger public health measures than the US, experienced far fewer deaths, and at the same time had better social and educational outcomes.

If anything, US officials weren’t cautious enough at the outset. Tran, again:

A claim we frequently see is that scientists and officials made some mistakes at the start of the pandemic, but this is understandable as science evolves. While this is true, it’s important to be more specific here, and explicitly state that this does not mean that “Covid measures went too far.”

The main mistakes made early on were not implementing Covid measures more effectively—such as not socially distancing quickly enough, not making tests widely available, and not acknowledging that Covid is airborne and ensuring there were enough high quality masks for everyone.

Public health interventions—like free Covid testing and vaccine sites and the use of a command economy to increase medical response (ABC News, 3/27/20)—as well as economic assistance to workers, businesses, tenants and the unemployed during economic upheaval gave Americans a small sample of a functioning social democratic state. Given the recent success of Democratic Socialists of America candidates, it’s clear many voters liked what they tasted.

No wonder Paul and the media are still so mad, more than six years after Covid nightmare came to America.

Janine Jackson interviewed Vincent Southerland, from the New York University School of Law, about Louisiana v. Callais for the July 31, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In the United States, there’s an incantation evoked when we see something horrific happening, and that’s: “Well, just vote against it.” The belief that this country is a democracy is powerful, such that even intelligent, aware people believe that if a person got elected, or a law got passed, it must have been because more people wanted it than didn’t.

It’s hard, it’s depressing, to learn that that isn’t how it works, that there are obstacles and loopholes and backdoor cronyism and payoffs and favor-trading, a million things that make a travesty of “one person, one vote.”

It’s one thing to be an aspirational society. Pretending harms aren’t serious harms because they don’t fit the model of the country you’re pretending to be—that’s something else entirely. It’s dangerous to keep seeing what’s happening in front of you, and calling it aberration, because “this isn’t who we are.”

Black people have never had the privilege to pretend that all the work is done. There’s no pleasure in watching so many other people wake up to that. But we do know that you have to be awake to make real change happen.

Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory, from the New Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vincent Southerland.

Vincent Southerland: Thanks so much for having me.

Brennan Center (4/29/26)

JJ: I want to take a moment to think about 1965, and the context of the Voting Rights Act. The hope of Black people that the law was the thing that could take us outside of existing racist power relationships, the law was our recourse. It wasn’t utopian; it was grounded. But talk a little about the Voting Rights Act and its impacts, to help us feel what’s happening now.

VS: Sure. So the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was really the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a result of years and years of struggle by countless individuals, working with every bit of their might: organizing, protesting, marching, but also pulling on levers of political and moral power to really vindicate the United States Constitution’s guarantee under the 15th Amendment that no government could deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Now, the critical point about the 15th Amendment was that it was part of a trio of amendments—the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments—that were enacted in the wake of the Civil War, during what is often referred to as this country’s second founding, kicking off the period of Reconstruction, which really tried to reorient the frame of this country, and remove the sorts of structural and moral racial barriers to full participation in the society. It really tried to vindicate the rights of Black people and ensure that the 13th Amendment ended enslavement; the 14th Amendment protected citizenship, as well as the full panoply of rights and privileges that come with citizenship; and the 15th Amendment securing the right to vote.

Equal Justice Initiative (8/13/24)

And so, even after the passage of the constitutional amendment, and the enactment of the constitutional amendment, there were still all sorts of efforts undertaken by states across the country, primarily in the South, to limit, prevent and otherwise undermine Black people’s political participation and the ability to vote. You think about things like poll taxes, think about things like the sorts of tests that people were forced to endure—count the number of jelly beans in this jar— pay a tax for being able to vote. And then downright and outright violence that was undertaken by individuals trying to prevent Black people from exercising their political power.

And so the Voting Rights Act was designed, really, to try and put an end to all those forms of discrimination, both the forms of discrimination that were explicit and intentional, and, over time, eventually with the amendment, forms of discrimination that were implicit, and more based on the effects rather than obvious expressions of intent by racists or others who were trying to deny Black people the right to vote.

And so what the Voting Rights Act did was change the political dynamics of this country. And what you saw was this tremendous uptick in the number of Black elected officials across the American South—across the country, really—at all levels of government, both in the federal and state and local elections. And so you had much more Black representation, because the law was used to remedy and prevent the sorts of efforts that individuals were engaging in to try to undermine the right to vote.

So 1965 was, at the time when the Voting Rights Act was signed as a law, I think there was a lot of hope about what the future held, and a lot of hope about the promise of the 15th Amendment and the promise of the Voting Rights Act to be able to vindicate people’s right to vote. And you saw the results of that over the ensuing years.

Hammer & Hope (Summer/26)

JJ: You can’t really overestimate the way the Voting Rights Act has been used to affect real change for Black people and, hence, for everyone. So let’s talk through what you write about, which is the historical significance of the 2026 Supreme Court ruling Louisiana v. Callais. It’s monumental.

VS: It really is. I mean, it represents one of the most consequential voting rights decisions in decades. And it really fundamentally shifts and alters the balance of power, not only in Congress and in federal elections, but in state and local elections as well. And, perhaps most importantly, rolls back the tremendous progress that has been made over decades to ensure that Black people and other people are able to exercise their right to vote. And what we think will be the result of this decision is an erasure of Black political power unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

And it’s hard to overstate just how deeply troubling and harmful this decision is going to be. It’s already having effects in states like Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina—and Louisiana, of course, where you’re seeing the elimination of seats that were previously held by Black elected officials––the elimination of Black elected political power across many of these states. And that sort of effort is going to only continue, unless and until either the federal government and our representatives in Congress, or those at the state level, take action to do something about it.

JJ: Maybe take a second to explain how that’s happening, how voter dilution happens when redistricting. You can’t give chapter and verse, but Louisiana v. Callais allowed states to do something. And what is that?

VS: Let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about the decision itself. So the Voting Rights Act had two primary pillars, if you will. One was Section Five, and Section Five of the Voting Rights Act basically required states that had engaged in historical discrimination in voting to submit to the federal government their plans for changing anything about the way in which the voting process was going to take place, to ensure that the changes they were making were not going to undermine the ability of Black people and other people of color to exercise their right to vote. That was one section.

Brennan Center (6/25/20)

Section Five was essentially gutted in an earlier Supreme Court decision a few years ago. So you have this one enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act that is already essentially dead letter.

What Callais did was strike at another provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section Two. And Section Two is often known as the sword of the Voting Rights Act because of its enforcement powers. What Section Two allowed individuals to do, was to challenge changes to the processes by which voting was going to take place, to ensure that Black people or other people of color were able to exercise the right to vote. And it would allow such challenges based on the effects of changes that states were going to make to their voting processes.

So let me give you one example, not necessarily drawn from the opinion, but just an example of the sorts of changes. Say I want to change a polling place from one part of town, where the vast majority of individuals who live in that part of town are Black and brown, to another part of town, or a place where Black and brown people are just unable to get to, because of lack of transportation, because it’s just difficult to get to, because the hours are difficult for them to be able to exercise the right to vote during those hours.

And so you want to make that change, just because you think it might be more convenient—you don’t have any animus, you’re not racist in any way, but you just want to make a change for some other unrelated reason. And maybe it’s better for Republican voters, or better for a certain class of voters unrelated to their race. Section Two would allow individuals to demonstrate that that change is going to have its effect on Black people’s ability to elect their candidate of choice, and therefore we need to prevent that change from happening, right?

Vincent Southerland: “What Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.”

What Callais does is essentially say that states and officials who are running the elections can make those sorts of changes, and make them as long as they are related to political party, that in order to prove that something nefarious was happening in the course of making those changes, you have to demonstrate that someone actually acted with racist intent, i.e., the person who’s making this change to the ways in which voting is going to happen has to declare that they’re doing it because they’re trying to harm Black people’s ability to exercise their right to vote, and disregards the very standard in the statute which looks to the effects of that sort of change. And so what Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.

So let me give you an example of how this plays out in the context of a change that might affect Black people’s rights to vote. And the Callais decision lays out an example to help clarify what this all means.

So imagine, for a moment, a state that is shaped like a rectangle. In the center of that rectangle is a circle. The rectangle itself is 90% white. The circle is 90% Black. Now imagine, under normal conditions, the people who are in the circle, the Black people are able to elect their representative of choice, year after year after year. They decide they want to elect X, Y, Z candidate. They’re able to elect that candidate year after year after year. The same is true for the people in the rectangle.

Now imagine the state legislature decides, you know what? We want to eliminate the political power of the people inside that circle. And so what the state does, in order to eliminate their political power, is split the circle into six equal slices, right? And takes each one of those slices and apportions it to part of the larger rectangle. So now that 90% population that was inside that circle is spread out across the entire rectangle.

And therefore the people inside that circle no longer are able to elect their candidate of choice. They’re no longer able to use their political power to express their political voice, meaning that their vote now counts for less than the people in the rectangle who are majority white. And so that is racial vote dilution.

What Section Two, under the old regime, would have allowed litigants to do is to challenge the legislature’s action by saying, “Look, you’re eliminating the ability of those people inside the circle, their ability to elect their candidate of choice. That’s a problem. That’s a problem under the law. You need to recreate a district or several districts that allow them to do that.”

What Callais says is, unless the state legislature says, “we’re doing this because we want to make sure Black people can’t vote,” there is no remedy. The law has no effect. And the fact that you could see the elimination of Black political power inside that circle being split into six equal slices and spread across the state is meaningless; the effects of it are meaningless. We only want to pay attention to the intent, the actions that are intentionally taken by state legislature, which is precisely what Section Two was designed to address, the effects and not the intent. Because, as we know, people who engage in racist behavior don’t often say we’re doing it because we are racist, because we want to stop Black people or brown people or other people of color from being able to vote.

Harvard Business Review (10/11/17)

They might give any other excuse in the book, but they’re not going to be as explicit about why they’re taking particular actions.

So I think that was designed with that understanding in mind, because we understand how racism operates, and the drafters and legislators who created Section Two, Republicans and Democrats alike, understood that you need something that’s going to allow us to get at the racist effects of these voting changes, rather than just declarations of intentional discrimination made by people who are undertaking these sort of changes. And so Callais changes the landscape in ways that are hard to understand just how much of a sea change it sparks.

JJ: And it’s against a backdrop, the way it’s being sold to a lot of people is this notion of colorblindness. And I know that a lot of people, Black, white, brown, laugh out loud at that idea. It’s not colorblind when I walk down the street or sit in some restaurants. It’s not colorblind when I apply for a loan or a job. We live in a color-seeing world. And so I think, for a lot of people, it just lands hollow when we say, “Oh, well, but no, it’s all the same. We’re all equal. So why should it matter that there is no longer a protection for Black voice in the voting process?”

Vox (8/3/26)

VS: That’s 100% right. And the Supreme Court, in particular the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, has time and time again returned to this ideology of colorblindness, this notion that the way to deal with racial injustice is to ignore racism, and treat everyone as though race does not matter.

And so you see this colorblindness ideology, not only through the court’s jurisprudence around the death penalty—there was a case in 1987, McCleskey v. Kemp, where you had a situation where Black individuals were more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim in the case was white. And what the court essentially said was, there’s no remedies for that, because we don’t have anybody engaging in intentional racial discrimination, and we can’t look at the effects of these sorts of decisions.

You see that colorblindness notion in the context of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on affirmative action, on this idea that we can’t try and remedy the lack of diversity that we find in our educational institutions, and that doing so, and undertaking any action that acknowledges the ways in which race casts a shadow over everything in our society problematic, is in and of itself a problem under the law, based on this ideology of colorblindness.

And I see it in the voting rights space as well, because what the court is doing is transforming any consideration of race into “suspect.”

JJ: You lay all of this out in your recent piece at Hammer & Hope. And you say in that piece: Given all that, what’s next? So I’ll ask you that. We won’t pretend things are simple or easy, but talk a little about what we can do besides hide under the covers.

VS: I think there are a few things. I think, first of all, we have to really take stock of just how much of a sea change and how significant this opinion actually is. And really take a step back and zoom out and think about what this court’s jurisprudence is actually signaling to us and telling us.

It’s of a piece with the Make America Great Again movement, the conservative or alt-right ideology. This notion that, basically, our past is our past; we’ve gotten over all of it, and we no longer need to think about or consider or be concerned about the ways in which race continues to shape our present-day and current-day reality. And that is the prevailing sentiment, this idea that trying to advance racial justice is an unnecessary task, because everything is blind now. Kind of, just get over it. And you see a Supreme Court that is almost signaling a sort of exhaustion with efforts to remedy our racial inequality.

The first thing you need to do is get to understand that our past is not past. It’s really with us right now, and it lives with us right now, and the effects of it are with us right now.

I think the second piece of it is to understand that we can’t simply ignore racial inequality. The only way to get beyond the sort of dynamics we find ourselves in today is to confront it head on, the same way that you would, if you go to the doctor and something’s bothering you, the doctor’s going to ask you, “What are your symptoms? What are your problems?” The doctor’s also going to ask you about your family history. And ask you about your past, about the things you’ve done, about the things that might have caused whatever ailment you have brought to her.

And you wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the past. None of that stuff matters.” Of course not. The same is true when it comes to racial inequality. And so I think there is that piece of it.

Brennan Center (2/29/26)

I think the other piece of it is, at the state level, we’ve seen states reacting and responding to Callais. New Jersey, I think, is a good example of this, passing things like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. These are state voting rights act provisions that essentially mirror a lot of what was set forth in the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, trying to replicate the regime that would allow state officials to ensure that Black people and other people of color are able to elect their candidates of choice. That will presume that changes that are being made to efforts to vote have to be cleared by the Secretary of State or other state officials before allowing those changes to go forward, to ensure that those changes are not going to have a disparate impact on Black voters. And so you see states passing laws, or that’s one of the things on the table to try and address the harm that Callais is certainly going to foster going forward.

And I think the last thing, among the last things that we need to do when we think about what comes next, and what we need to be focused on, is beginning to understand just how fragile the gains that we’ve made over the last half century, 75 years, actually are. And understand that whenever we’ve made progress, retrenchment is often what comes next, and follows almost immediately after that. And understand that our obligation is to continue to fight these fights, to continue to talk about and call out racial injustice when we see it, whenever we see it, wherever we see it. And to have an understanding of how racial injustice is not only a challenge for Black and brown people, but is a challenge for all of us. Because we live in a multiracial democracy, with a Constitution that has these lofty ideals, that we have a responsibility to close the gap between the reality that we are living and the ideals that we see in our foundational documents.

And so I think part of what I would implore us to do is stay educated, stay conscious, stay focused on the harmful things that our government, that our courts, are engaged in, so we don’t lose sight of those sorts of challenges and get distracted by the noise that’s out in the world today.

So I think if we do some of those things, alongside building durable political coalitions that I think draw on people from all walks of life who care about justice, care about freedom, who care about liberation, and understand that building political power in that way is going to allow us to leverage the law in ways that are going to advance our cause as well.

JJ: Well, there’s a lot more I could ask you, but we’ll have to end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Vincent Southerland. His piece, “The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power,” can be found at HammerAndHope.org. Vincent Southerland, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VS: Thanks so much, Janine. It’s wonderful to be here.

60 Minutes announced a batch of new hires to replace a number of staffers fired by CBS network commissar Bari Weiss, with the most prominent addition being longtime conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (Washington Post, 7/28/26). 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton—brought in by Weiss from Vanity Fair—called Douthat “one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy.”

FAIR has been chronicling Douthat for a while now. Here’s some of the outstanding examples we’ve catalogued of his “empathy” and “rigor.”

That Silly Commentariat

Ross Douthat was far from alone (Extra!, 6/16) in his confidence that “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee” in 2016, as he declared in the (New York Times (1/7/16). Douthat was a bit more confident than most in the accuracy of his crystal ball: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary,” he predicted on Twitter (9/25/15).

Defending ‘Juan Crow’

ICE agents killing Alex Pretti (Texas Public Radio, 2/1/26).

Ross Douthat (5/2/10) criticized those who were “impugning the motives” of an Arizona immigration law that

has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

But the Arizona law, Douthat argued, was just a response to the federal government’s failure to “regain…control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it’s been found difficult and left untried.” Real “control,” he suggested, would involve “enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border.”

As FAIR noted at the time, actually trying to purge some 11 million residents from the country would involve measures that would be draconian by any standard.

Douthat wrote that his vision of “control” would require “shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor”—an acknowledgement that forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.

“You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem.” Douthat wrote. As FAIR (5/3/10) responded at the time, “Yes, you can see why politicians don’t want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions.”

We Need More Babies—No, Not Those Babies

Ross Douthat (New York Times, 3/27/21).

Ross Douthat has long been obsessed with the so-called “baby bust” (FAIR.org, 2/7/23). The columnist (1/21/23) argued that those worried about climate change are naively missing the real threat: a “population bust” that will result in “a zero-sum struggle between a swollen retired population and the overburdened young.”

It’s highly debatable that a population bust is even an economic problem—and it’s certainly not an unsolvable one (CEPR, 1/17/23). But assuming the primacy of a population crisis allows Douthat to upsell his conservative wishlist: namely, reducing entitlements for the aging and ending abortion (New York Times, 1/21/23, 12/14/22).

The global population is actually expected to continue growing for at least another 25 to 50 years, as Douthat acknowledged when he noted that the population of Africa could triple by the end of the century. But Douthat sees Black and brown people not as solutions, but as part of the problem. If “even a fraction of this population” migrates, he warned,

the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand, and destabilization and backlash on the other, will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in revitalization or collapse.

His baby bust obsession is clearly grounded in xenophobia and white nationalist anxieties.  In Europe, he argued (10/1/22):

The preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash—even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.

He was even more blunt in a column (10/20/18) headlined “Fear of a Black Continent”—subtitled “Why European elites are worrying about African babies.” In it, Douthat warned of the dangers of increasing African migration to Europe, but said that  attempts to slow the African birthrate would be “cruel”—so, instead,

anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children.

If that sounds like eugenics, that’s because it is.

Pelosi’s World—and Ours

“Pondering what [Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for,” Ross Douthat (11/14/10) wrote. Part of that nightmare vision was “a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.” Douthat seemed unaware that the “retirement age” had already been rising when he wrote that for seven years; since 2003, every year-long cohort of retirees has had to wait two more months  to reach what’s called “full retirement age.” These “budges” continued until 2026, with the “full” retirement age now 67 (FAIR.org, 11/15/10).

Get the Iraq War Wrong the Right Way

Matt Damon in Green Zone.

Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, Ross Douthat (3/14/10) offered a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ended with:

And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

This was based on the popular but evidence-free notion that Saddam Hussein fooled the US into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). As FAIR (3/15/10) wrote, “Needless to say, when you’re complaining that a fictional film isn’t factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren’t fictional.”

(As a college student, Douthat was also wrong about the Iraq invasion in real time, writing in the Harvard Salient—2/14/02—that Saddam Hussein “is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, to supplement his extensive collection of biological and chemical weaponry.”)

Repeal Roe and We’ll Stop Killing Doctors

Dr. George Tiller

Ross Douthat (6/8/09) blamed the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, on Roe v. Wade: “By enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be,” he wrote:

One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions—Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? —is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else.

Douthat offered what he presented as a compromise: “If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically,” because

arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester—as many advanced democracies already do—would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

What would women gain from losing their bodily autonomy?

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases—and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

As FAIR (6/12/09) noted, Douthat’s compromise was: Allow states to criminalize abortion, and anti-abortion fanatics will stop murdering doctors.

‘A Little More State Regulation’

KFF (4/27/26)

Ross Douthat (4/2/21) maintained that “abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant” about the  6–3 majority Republicans had installed for them on the Supreme Court:

It’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all (mostly limitations in the second trimester, along the lines of many European countries), but then for the few states that go further to find themselves boycotted and besieged, leaving the goal of ending abortion nationwide as far away as ever.

When Douthat wrote that, ten states had trigger laws that would ban abortion the moment Roe was overturned (FAIR.org, 5/19/21). As of 2026, 17 states have near-total bans on abortion.

Homophobia Not a ‘Structural System of Oppression’

xkcd (10/8/14)

In a column urging the courts to stay out of the “difficult and personal” decision as to whether or not to discriminate against gay couples, Douthat dismissed the obvious parallel to discrimination against interracial marriage (New York Times, 4/4/15):

This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country. It seems possible, and reasonable, to live and let live.

Not a “structural system of oppression”? Same-sex sexual activity was illegal in every state until 1962, and the Supreme Court upheld such bans in 1986 as reflecting “millennia of moral teaching.” When the Supreme Court struck down the criminalization of gay sexuality in 2003, 13 states still had anti-“sodomy” laws on the books.

During the Cold War, the US government purged thousands of gay men and lesbians from the military and other government posts because, as a 1950 Senate report had it, “those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.” Only in 2011 could gays and lesbians begin to serve openly in the armed forces.This is what FAIR (4/6/15) described as “a concerted, structural, systemic effort going back generations to marginalize and punish homosexuality”—brushed aside by Douthat as “a handful of shops across the country.”

Pope Benedict ‘Looking Good’ While Covering Up Child Abuse

Pope Benedict

Ross Douthat (4/11/10) cited the reporting of Jason Berry (National Catholic Reporter, 4/6/10), who criticized Pope John Paul II for his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a child molester who founded the influential Legion of Christ. But Douthat spun it as a positive story about John Paul’s successor:

Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down…. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.

The problem with this testimonial is that Ratzinger was first informed about Maciel’s pattern of abuse in 1994. The cardinal’s reported response: Maciel’s case was a “touchy problem” due to the “benefits” he had brought to the Vatican. “One can’t put on trial such a close friend of the pope as Marcial Maciel,” Ratzinger was later quoted.

“It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office,” Douthat wrote, offering this as evidence of Ratzinger’s zeal to persecute child-abusing priests. Unmentioned was the letter Ratzinger wrote in 2001 threatening to excommunicate any bishop who discussed abuse cases outside of the church’s legal system (Extra!, 7–8/08; FAIR.org, 5/13/08).

Nor did Douthat cite Ratzinger’s assertion that attention to clerical molestation amounted to a conspiracy against the Catholic Church (Zenit, 12/3/02): “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign.”

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NPR (7/16/26)

This week on CounterSpin: “In Primetime Speech, Trump Doesn’t Provide Evidence for Illegal Voting” was the temperate headline NPR put on a story about Trump’s recent East Room speech that, they allowed, “included many baseless claims” about election integrity. They told us that “many of the documents the White House posted online during the speech did not appear to fully support sweeping claims the president made,” and even got to the point of calling his contention that he won the 2020 election “a lie.”

What the story didn’t do was show, with urgency, how voting in the upcoming midterms and beyond will be materially affected by the use of state power to promote ideas that they’re saying are, yeah, for sure, not true.

Obstacles to voting don’t have to be valid to have impact. Black people know that better than anyone. And it isn’t just Trump’s lies, that media keep repeating, even as they call them lies; the Supreme Court’s June decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes the terrain different, in ways people need to understand and confront.

Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory.

We talk with him this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Gaza genocide.

Featured image: San Francisco voting rights activists, 1956 (Frances Albrier Collection)

Janine Jackson interviewed writer, organizer and minister Dorothee Benz about the Prairieland trial for the July 24, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Guardian (7/15/26)

Janine Jackson: In addition to the visible, horrific murders in the streets by ICE agents, at least 52 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the US, between Trump’s inauguration last January and June 4 of this year. Reasons include unsanitary facilities, inadequate food, substandard health infrastructure and delayed—which is to say, denied—medical care.

That would include Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a Venezuelan man who died while being transferred between detention facilities in Georgia. ICE says it was cardiac arrest. His family says ICE refused to allow him to take medications with him when they snatched him up.

The people subjected to these lethal conditions have not all been charged, much less convicted, with any crime. But corporate news media are hard at work suggesting to us that somehow, for some reason, we shouldn’t seriously value their lives. And we shouldn’t seriously question their killings. And we should get ready for more.

A whole lot of people are not accepting that. And some of them gathered outside the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, last year to say “no,” and to show solidarity with the people detained, with a noise demonstration.

FAIR.org (7/22/26)

When one protester saw a police officer pulling his weapon, he fired his own rifle, wounding an officer. That man, Benjamin Song, has now been sentenced to 100 years in prison. And he was asked in court if he would deny being part of Antifa. According to NPR North Texas, Benjamin Song “defended anti-fascism as a belief.” “‘What kind of people are not against fascism?’ Song said.” Well, those eight defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison, including Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who wasn’t even there.

Prairieland is a test of this country’s aspirations toward democracy and, more immediately, a challenge to a press corps that insists that it is free. A new piece at FAIR.org looks at how the corporate press are meeting this moment. We’re joined now by its author.

Dorothee Benz is a social justice writer, organizer and an ordained minister dedicated to fighting white Christian nationalism. She joins us now by phone from Inwood. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dorothee Benz.

Dorothee Benz: I’m delighted to be here.

New Republic (6/25/26)

JJ: My planned first question was: I would hope that anyone paying attention could see how monumental this Prairieland case is—for free speech, for democratic participation, for fundamental human rights. Tell us what you found that the major media, that many of us still look to, what did that corporate media do with this case? And why does their emphasis, or their erasures, why does that matter?

DB: It actually took me quite a while of digging to figure out how bad the case was. I mean, the corporate coverage was so anemic and so missing a couple of really important points that I had to keep digging before I even understood the problem.

Because the case itself is deeply problematic. It’s built on a legal theory that relies on a made-up category that Antifa is a terrorist organization, and that people are guilty of material support of terrorism, that is not problematized in the media at all. And there were also tremendously significant procedural irregularities in the case that really made it pretty much a show trial in a lot of ways. And none of that is really apparent in the corporate coverage.

I would say that the corporate coverage came down to three big omissions. One is framing the issue at stake in the Prairieland trial as one of violence, and not protected First Amendment activity. All of the headlines and all of the leads were basically “violent protesters” and “part of an armed assault” and things like that, as opposed to a protected First Amendment right to protest, and a right to have political opinions. And therefore they missed the story, that what was being criminalized here is dissent and not terrorism.

FAIR.org (10/3/25)

And then the second problem, really, and this is I think the deepest problem, was failing to understand and question the legal theory behind the case, which is built on the idea of “material support for terrorism,” whereby terrorism here is this made-up entity of Antifa.

And it’s one thing for Donald Trump to say Antifa is terrorist. It’s another thing for a judge to throw people in jail for decades on that same theory.

And then, lastly, I would say everything comes down to Antifa, understanding what Antifa is and isn’t, and how it is constructed for the purpose of criminalizing dissent. And the media missed that entirely.

JJ: I just feel like we’re going to hear NSPM-7, and we can spell that out, but we’re going to hear it again and again invoked as if it was a real thing. And to me, I go back to when “war on terror” was taken out of quotation marks, because it used to be kind of a thing that like, what is this actually? And then, suddenly, media just said, “OK, it’s a thing.” And I’m concerned that this domestic terrorism definition is just going to be silently slid into the language that people are accepting that they hear. And it’s so dangerous.

Brennan Center (10/9/25)

DB: Absolutely. And I think Antifa is the symbol of that.

So all of the major news stories were quick to say Antifa is not a membership organization, which is kind of implied in the way Donald Trump talks about it. But then they went on to describe it as a “loose network” or an “ideology” or something like that. And none of them were able to say that it is a right-wing bogeyman that’s made up exactly for the purpose that it’s now being deployed to do, which is to take a whole bunch of people whose political opinions the right doesn’t like, lump them together, call them dangerous, call them violent, call them terrorist, and therefore make them vulnerable to these kinds of prosecutions. Nobody said that.

And they also attached the label “far left” to the name Antifa, as though being anti-fascist is somehow now beyond the pale. And in doing that, they inadvertently, I think, legitimize the government’s effort to take the First Amendment activities, to take political opinions that are anti-fascist, that are pro-democracy, that are pro-dissent, that are anti–ethnic cleansing, and make them suspect, and therefore make them vulnerable to prosecution in exactly this way.

JJ: And I wonder, why would not a press corps that is invested, presumably, in presenting a range of disparate views, how would you not see that as an alarm? How would you not be alarmed by, and get to work fighting, a declaration that says we’re going to call particular viewpoints “terrorism,” and we’re going to treat them like crimes? To me, that’s where a press corps would leap up. And that’s not what we’re seeing.

DB: No, it’s not. And I think it starts with the press being, I’ll just say “intimidated,” I don’t know if that’s really the right verb, by the call “terrorism.” Whenever the government shouts “terrorism,” rather than stick their necks out and maybe invite some backlash, they’re going to just take that pretty much at face value, and then sort of nibble around the edges, but not contest the central claim of it, right?

Because the central claim here was A) that Antifa exists, right, as opposed to being this entity that’s made up for the purpose of criminalizing dissent. And then B) that people who wear all-black clothing—as those of us in New York do every day—read anarchist books, have left-wing literature in their homes, that that makes them part of Antifa, which then in the equation means it must be violent, and therefore it must be terrorist. And that “terrorist” label just, I think, spooks the press, and then they back down. And that is not a good sign.

JJ: I think it spooks people, too. I think once you put that label “terrorist,” something shuts down, and somehow ‘under the jail’ isn’t bad enough. And I think interrogating that whole language has got to be part of what we’re doing.

And I guess that leads me to my question of what do you think a vital, independent, engaged, humanist, critical press corps would be doing right now? What would we be doing? Folks are in the streets, folks are working, but we could have media that support that work. And what do you think that kind of press corps would look like?

In These Times (3/26/26)

DB: Well, at first I think it would look like accurate and 360-degree reporting. So much of the work that I did in writing this piece was actually in finding out what the case itself was. Usually when I write a piece for FAIR, you can see what the facts of the case are, and then you can see the corporate spin on it. This was like, I had to dig well beyond corporate sources to even understand what the case was. And the more I dug, the more appalling it looked. So things that the Intercept or In These Times or other independent outlets reported are perfectly capable—like, the New York Times could report the same things. So these things just need to be reported.

And then, secondly, I would say corporate media, any media, needs to unpack terms and claims that are left intact and create a bias. In this case, the idea of “material support for terrorism.” There’s a whole body of law around “material support.” But no one ever explained that term, let alone that applying it to this idea of Antifa was creating an entire legal fiction on which people were then convicted.

That sentence that I just said is nowhere in the press. And that’s really the alarm bell that should have gone off. Police lie. Police lie all the time. And reporting “he said, she said,”—if that; there wasn’t a lot of the “she said” in these stories, even—is not the same as saying, “This is not true. This is a novel legal theory that is dangerous and is not based in existing law at all.”

Pretending that these kinds of show trials and show prosecutions—Prairieland is one thing, but the folks that were just arrested in Minneapolis, the folks that were arrested in Ohio, this is not the first or the last. Pretending that these are something other than political prosecution is not serving us well.

And I’ll say that, in many ways, our elite institutions, in the last year and a half, have really failed us. The law firms that caved to the demands of the administration, the universities that caved—let’s not even talk about the Democratic Party, the corporate media. While ordinary and often extremely vulnerable people, who don’t have the resources or the lawyers that any of these institutions have, have stood up with incredible integrity and courage to challenge human rights violations and to challenge the narratives propping them up.

Slate (7/27/26)

We need our media to do the same thing, to defend the right to dissent along the way. Whether it was the student encampments or the detainees at Delaney Hall and their incredibly courageous hunger strike and labor strike, and the protesters outside. Everybody in Minneapolis. If 70-year-old Lutheran church ladies can be in the streets challenging ICE, then certainly corporate media can get it together to deconstruct these novel legal theories that are being used to criminalize dissent.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to ways forward in just a second, but I’ll just hold you on media for a minute. I think a lot of the time, media criticism gets, maybe not bogged down, but misdirected by individual personalities: “Well, this person said this, but do they really believe it?” Or even by meta concerns: “Should we be consuming media at all? Why don’t we just touch grass?” But pretending that news media don’t shape our ideas and our understanding, not least our understanding of our political capacity, seems to me like whistling past the graveyard.

I remember a person from Radio for Peace International saying that people told him that if he didn’t like what was on the radio, he should just turn it off. And he said, “OK, I’ll turn it off. But my neighbor might not turn it off. And the radio might tell him to go kill the leftist next door.”

I believe in media hygiene; I don’t think we should soak ourselves in it. But I don’t think we can ignore journalism, and just pretend that it doesn’t affect us. So there has to be a way to integrate our media criticism into the other social justice work that we do.

DB: Absolutely. I mean, media literacy is important. Media criticism of corporate media, and understanding their interests and their structural location in the larger story of who this country is, is important, and holding them to account. And it’s not like everything that they do is always terrible, but their structural biases are, at this moment, really extremely dangerous.

JJ: Yeah, to gird ourselves against. And that’s just part of the work that we’re going to need to do if we plan to stay alive and fight.

Going forward, these are difficult and dark times. You are a hopeful person. And I just wonder, what do you say to folks who just want to lay down and pull up the covers, right? There’s a lot to do, and there’s a lot of reasons to do it.

Dorothee Benz: “It’s up to us to connect with our neighbors, and build something collective that together, on scale, will change the world.”

DB: Yeah. Well, I certainly understand wanting to just pull the covers over my head. There’s a lot of days that start like that for me as well.

But I would say a couple things. One, what came to mind, as I was thinking about this conversation today, was Howard Zinn’s “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” And I was thinking about it in the context of challenging the media to abandon their faux objectivity. The idea that there is such a thing as objectivity. That somehow reporting this trial as though it was something other than a sham is somehow doing a service to objective journalism. I was thinking of it in that context, but it really is in the context of what we’re all called to do every day. You’re on this train, and you’re either fighting fascism or you’re abetting it. So that’s the one thing I would say about that. Maybe that’s not too hopeful.

But the other thing is that we know that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and that when we do them together collectively, the power of nonviolent noncooperation on scale has literally failed empires. It sent the British packing in India. It brought down the Berlin Wall. It ended apartheid in South Africa. We know we have that power. And it’s not up to any of us to bring down the Berlin Wall by ourselves, but it’s up to us to connect with our neighbors, and build something collective that together, on scale, will change the world.

JJ: That’s a beautiful place to end on. We’ve been speaking with Dorothee Benz. Her piece, “Prairieland Was a Test, and Corporate Media Failed,” is up right now at FAIR.org. Thank you so much, Dorothee Benz, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Oh, my pleasure.

A New York Times story (7/24/26) about the stabbing of two men—one Asian, one Jewish—includes the word “Asian” twice and the word “Jewish” 24 times.

The nonfatal stabbings of two individuals in Manhattan, allegedly by a man shouting “Allahu akbar”—or “God is the greatest” in Arabic—has drawn a lot of media attention, most of which centered on the fact that one of the victims was a Jewish man. (He was leaving a synagogue wearing a yarmulke—Fox 5, 7/24/26.) The fact that his first victim was Asian was almost completely lost in the media narrative.

At the New York Times (7/24/26), reporter Liam Stack (with the help of five other reporters) produced more than 1,000 words about how the stabbing reignited the question of whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s criticism of the Israeli government has fueled hatred against Jews generally. The Asian victim fell in the background.

AP (7/25/26), by contrast, was somewhat more balanced:

The Jewish victim was attacked just after leaving a nearby synagogue, called the Jewish Center, Rabbi Yosie Levine said.

“He was just trying to pray at his synagogue, and now we’re the ones praying for his recovery,” Levine said.

The Asian American Foundation, a New York-based advocacy group, said in a statement the attacks “underscore the persistent safety challenges” and mistreatment—from harassment to physical assault—facing Asian Americans in the city.

‘A culture of denigration’

Saying that Zohran Mamdani “accuses Jews of genocide” (Wall Street Journal, 7/24/26) is like saying that critics of Vladimir Putin accuse Orthodox Christians of invading Ukraine.

The Wall Street Journal (7/24/26) offered an editorial titled “Globalizing the Intifada in Mamdani’s New York” with the subhead, “As the mayor accuses Jews of genocide, a Jewish man is stabbed.” Mamdani, of course, did not accuse “Jews” of genocide; he accused the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing genocide, as have Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, most relevantly, the International Criminal Court (X, 7/22/26; Guardian, 7/22/26).

The Journal board said:

Mr. Mamdani isn’t responsible for Thursday’s stabbing. But he is responsible for promoting a culture of denigration that is all too easy for a fevered mind to hear and conclude that violence against Jews is acceptable. The mayor and his ideological groupies are playing with antisemitic fire.

The New York Post (7/24/26) was slightly more direct in its editorial. “Mamdani needs to admit that his speech has consequences,” the board said. “Quit fanning the flames, Mr. Mayor. Just stop.”

And several outlets covered a pro-Israel rally where speakers blamed the mayor’s support for Palestinians for violence against Jews. “Every word that comes out of his mouth—his obsessive Jew hatred, his obsessive hatred of Western ideology—is causing violence,” EndJewHatred director Michelle Ahdoot was quoted at WPIX (7/26/26).

The free paper amNY (7/26/26) covered the rally, saying that some laid the “blame at the feet of Mamdani for recent criticisms Hizzoner made about Benjamin Netanyahu, stating that the prime minister of Israel is not welcome in New York.” “Some members of the Jewish community feel as though these statements put them at risk,” the paper added. It included dramatic images from the Manhattan rally, including a pro-Israel protester flipping off pro-Palestine ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators.

‘I know he’s dead’

NBC4‘s Melissa Russo (Instagram, 7/22/26) wondered why Mamdani didn’t promise to arrest Hamas’s leaders “if circumstances were different”—i.e., if they were alive.

Corporate media are eager to platform those who constantly assert that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews—in this case, that his choice to focus on one political leader, Netanyahu, counts as provocation against the Jews. The media’s attempt to box the mayor in here could be seen in a press conference directly after the speech about Netanyahu. In a transcript released by his office, a reporter (NBC 4‘s Melissa Russo) asked:

Some Jewish groups have noted that in your video you didn’t include a reference to October 7 or Hamas leaders who carried out that attack. And it’s not easy always to pin you down on this subject, forgive me, because there aren’t many perfect analogies to draw. For instance, not all world leaders or alleged war criminals have ICC warrants, or they’re not planning to come to the UN General Assembly, or perhaps they’re dead.

So, my question is would you, if circumstances were different, would you have vowed to arrest the leaders of Hamas, who perpetrated the October 7 attack, if they were visiting New York? And if so, why not include something about that to show New Yorkers that you’re presenting a more balanced approach? Why not include that in your video?

Quick on his feet, the mayor responded, “Didn’t the ICC put forward a warrant for Yahya Sinwar?”—referring to the Hamas leader who was killed by Israel (AP, 10/18/24). To which Russo responded, “I mean, I know he’s dead.” The mayor followed up:

Yes, but my point is that they did. And in the video, I made very clear, as I have before, that my interest in executing that warrant is not specific to Benjamin Netanyahu, but to anyone who they put a warrant towards for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

One has to almost admire the bravery to ask such a stupid question: Why didn’t you call for the arrest of someone who died two years ago? Alas, here we are.

‘More mindful about [some] rhetoric’

There’s a downside to not talking about war crimes (Al Jazeera, 6/19/26).

But how can only one of the two victims in the stabbing coverage matter? While it has been a few years, Asian communities in the city have protested against waves of anti-Asian crimes (WNBC, 3/21/21; New York Times, 3/22/21).

We don’t know what was going on this stabber’s head—New Yorkers are all too accustomed to the fact that he may very well likely be deranged with little discernible motive. But if such an attack can be used to beat up on Mamdani’s pro-Palestine positions, why is there no exploration into whether constant fearmongering about China from the White House is responsible for the stabbing of an Asian person? Why is there not as much attention to how Asian communities are feeling about this?

“Elected officials and Jewish leaders demanded Friday that politicians be more mindful about their rhetoric around Israel. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s name came up several times,” Politico (7/24/26) reported. The same statement about right-wing politicians and their views on China doesn’t get the same kind of treatment.

And there’s another problem: All of this digression about how incendiary Mamdani’s comments about Netanyahu may have been helped bury the news Mamdani was trying to highlight: that the Israeli leader and his government have been accused of heinous crimes against humanity. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder (6/19/26) said during a press briefing  in Geneva:

For many, many months, the world has been told there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet for Palestinian children, this so-called ceasefire has become a cruel and deadly illusion.

Since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, 265 Palestinian children have been killed across Gaza. That is an absurd and devastating figure. During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months.

Let us be clear about what this means. These children were not killed in a war zone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. Playing football. Fishing. They were shot, bombed and struck by quadcopters.

The double standard is telling when it comes to who matters for the media, and which narratives are worthy of repeating.

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Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines. (Photo: DFW Support Committee)

This week on CounterSpin: Are you upset about ICE agents using your tax dollars to detain and deport people because they have a quota to fill – and to kill anyone who doesn’t “comply”? Are you bothered by women losing not just the right but the ability to access abortion for whatever reason they might have? Do you care that fossil fuel-created climate disruption is rearranging the planet?  Well, my friend, you might be a terrorist.

Last September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that added a whole lot of folks to a list of “domestic terrorists”. All of us are now officially, by challenging or questioning the Trump White House and their acolytes, “the enemy within.”

When Trump pushed through NSPM 7 last fall, folks like Hina Shamsi at the ACLU told us: it’s a scare tactic – “domestic terrorism organization” as applied to a wide range of groups that are, in the memo’s language “anti-americanism, anti-capitalism, anti christianity” does not create new federal crimes or powers. The president, even if it’s Trump, cannot rewrite the Constitution.

Which, Shamsi explained, doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, despite being a “fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with ‘criminal and terroristic conspiracies’.

We have to stand up where we can, how we can, right now. And right now could have started years ago but it can at the least start with getting prison time for moving zines. 

We’ll talk about the Prairieland case and what it means for you, with Dorothee Benz, who wrote recently about it all for FAIR.org