A lawyer representing some Sandy Hook parents said that Alex Jones was “trying to keep the bloated corpse of a media organization alive” (AP, 4/30/26).

Silence had never sounded so sweet, blankness had never looked so beautiful. A visit to the far-right conspiracy outlet Infowars website had no “Jesus Returns”–sized headlines about government-tainted water turning the frogs gay, or fresh anti-vaccine claims. No promotions for host Alex Jones’ supplements, either, or videos of him screaming gibberish about politicians eating babies. Just a white screen and two very small words: “Off Air.”

Jones’ media career, anchored in his hysterical performance, is still hanging on for dear life. As AP (4/30/26) reported, Infowars

is facing liquidation because of the more than $1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments Jones owes relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for calling the Connecticut massacre a hoax.

The news service explained that the new deal would give the satirical news outlet the “Onion temporary authority to use Infowars’ trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property while a state receiver in Texas works toward liquidation.”

The judgment against him in the defamation case signaled that a society that values truth over lies finally drew the line at a media empire profiting and inciting hatred at the expense of more than two dozen murdered children and their families.

‘Unprecedented legal stalling’

NPR (4/30/26): “Jones says he is still being forced to leave his Infowars studio, and plans to move to a new one Thursday night and rebuild under new ownership.”

The transfer has not been completely ratified, which is why the site is now blank. The Onion expected the deal to be finalized at the end of April, “letting it license the Infowars brand name and turn the show into a mockery of itself,” with proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families (NPR, 4/30/26). But as NPR explained, “Jones won a reprieve from a Texas appeals court, and the families’ attorneys filed their own appeal to the Supreme Court of Texas,” leaving control of Infowars “in limbo until the higher courts weigh in.”

Onion CEO Ben Collins (Threads, 4/29/26) offered fighting words:

This newly insane, unprecedented legal stalling does nothing but delay our deal with the receiver to take control of InfoWars. We now expect new traps in Alex Jones’ amoral war to deny paying the Sandy Hook families, but we’re freshly surprised by the US legal system’s appetite to put up with it.

And the court process hasn’t stopped the Onion from taking on the Infowars name and hiring comedian Tim Heidecker to turn the site into a parody of itself (Rolling Stone, 5/2/26).

Difficult to overstate

Alex Jones (2/21/11): “They tell your kids they gotta love Justin Biebler [sic], and then Biebler says ‘hand in your guns,’ ‘pass the Cyber Security Act,’ and ‘the police state is good,’ and then your children are turned into  mindless vassals—who now, they look up to some twit, instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson, or looking up to Nikola Tesla, or looking up to Magellan.”

Few have matched Jones’ ability to turn rancid delusions into mainstream talking points, influencing a xenophobic, racist and transphobic political movement that has taken power in the United States.

“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation,” he said in June 2010 (NBC, 8/7/18). “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.”

“These wicked globalists are so threatened by human potential they poison the water, the vaccines, the food to turn us into a bunch of slugs, a bunch of lobotomized sloths so they can control us,” he declared in 2011 (Alex Jones Show, 2/21/11).

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Jones declared at the Million MAGA March (Newsweek, 12/12/20): “World government is here, and the system is publicly stealing this election from the biggest landslide and the biggest political realignment since 1776.”

Jones is not solely responsible for the fact that a growing sector of the American public believes anti-vaccine pseudoscience (Gallup, 8/7/24; Scientific American, 4/26/26), paving the way for RFK Jr.’s anti-human policies (FAIR.org, 12/5/24), but it’s impossible to ignore his contribution to this mess.

While Trump recently turned on Jones along with a number of other right-wing media personalities, like Tucker Carlson (KOMO, 4/17/26), Jones’ act—along with Carlson’s—is inseparable from Trump’s rise (New Yorker, 6/23/16; New York Times, 11/16/16, 4/20/22; Frontline, 7/28/20).

Bucking the trend

“Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things,”  60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi told the National Press Club (Guardian, 4/30/26). “We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence.”

The Trump administration destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/1/25) and it installed Kari Lake, a fanatical Jones wannabe, to run the US government’s international propaganda broadcaster Voice of America, although a court recently found her administration to be unlawful (All Things Considered, 3/8/26). The Ellison family takeover of CBS has been a catastrophe for the storied network (Zeteo, 4/29/26; USA Today, 4/30/26), especially its flagship news show 60 Minutes (Guardian, 4/30/26).

All of this has been a part of the contraction in media under an administration that has no time for journalism that holds government and corporations accountable. One arm of the right’s media machine folding into the Onion, which skewers US foreign policy and corporate greed better than most bona fide corporate media, would be a small victory against this anti-democratic trend.

If anyone thinks it’s unfair for a media outlet to be turned into a parody of itself, well, it’s already happened to the Washington Post under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

None of this will bring true justice to the Sandy Hook parents, but to the rest of us it provides some catharsis, giving hope that not every change to the media landscape needs to be for the worse.

Janine Jackson interviewed Consumer Reports‘ Derek Kravitz about dynamic pricing for the May 1, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Forbes (6/24/24)

Janine Jackson: If you’re just trying to assess the way corporations view a particular development, you can learn more from how they talk among themselves than whatever narrative is crafted for general consumption. On dynamic pricing, let’s look just at headlines from Forbes Magazine.

In 2024, we have “Harnessing AI for Dynamic Pricing for Your Business,” saying “AI has emerged as a critical tool for implementing dynamic pricing strategies, enabling businesses to adjust prices in real-time based on market demand.”

In 2025, we get “Making Dynamic Pricing a C-Suite Imperative.” That declares that “in order to elevate pricing in your company, own it and ensure your leadership teams are treating pricing as the strategic lever it is.”

Some potential obstacles creep in. Later, Forbes offers “Dynamic Pricing: A Balance Between Strategy and Consumer Perception,” which tells us that “in the ever-evolving landscape of business strategies, dynamic pricing has emerged as a contentious yet fascinating approach.”

And then early this year, we have “Preparing Now for Continuous Dynamic Pricing,” which leads with, “Unfortunately, dynamic pricing isn’t a passing trend; it’s the new normal.” And it includes the telling sentence: “Consumers are increasingly being trained to accept dynamic pricing.”

Well, if only there were as much public-interest press interrogating this latest mechanism as there are owner-focused outlets talking about how to most profitably exploit it.  But there is work going on, and our guest is part of it.

Consumer Reports

Investigative journalist Derek Kravitz is deputy editor of special projects at Consumer Reports, and a lead behind a collaborative investigation on pricing with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Derek Kravitz.

Derek Kravitz: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: As your reporter—one of them in this series—notes early on, “Charging different amounts to different customers for the same products is not illegal or new.” So maybe let’s start with just some clarification, because folks will hear about “algorithmic pricing,” about “dynamic pricing,” about “surveillance pricing.” What is meaningful to distinguish there? There is a difference between a flight being cheaper on a Wednesday, than a can of soup costing you more than your next-door neighbor.

Consumer Reports (12/9/25)

DK: Yeah, so that’s a good question. We as Americans have been accustomed to price changes for things like airline tickets or hotel reservations or concert tickets for years. In fact, dynamic pricing goes back decades. It basically means charging different prices based on supply and demand. So when you are closer to a flight, a few days out from a potential trip, the price of that ticket is going to be higher than it would be weeks in advance. And so, in many ways, we’ve become accustomed to that type of dynamic or shifting price changes.

With respect to algorithmic pricing, that is new, because only in the last five to ten years have we started to use mobile apps and online shopping more and more, and to such a degree that now that has overtaken in-person and brick-and-mortar shopping. And so because of that, algorithmic and online shopping allows for really, really quick and precise price changes for customers.

And this is where you’re starting to see a groundswell of reaction to those pricing tactics, to those strategies that companies use in order to attract more money from customers. I mean, it’s Capitalism 101, but it’s supercharged now with the new technology that they have available.

JJ: And I want to ask you specifically about the Instacart research that you did some months back, because that makes it specific. What were you looking for there? How hard was it to find it? And then, what were your particular takeaways from that work?

DK: Instacart is the largest third-party grocery delivery platform in the United States, and it works with a lot of different grocery chains, some of the largest in the country, including Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, Costco, Whole Foods. And it’s become ubiquitous, especially since the pandemic, for people ordering, including the elderly and those on SNAP benefits, and those in rural food deserts that might not have the transportation to go to a brick-and-mortar grocery store.

And so we wanted to understand how pricing worked on Instacart, because they’ve been very upfront for years that they use algorithmic pricing, and that they can rapidly change prices in order to not just respond to supply and demand, but also personalize prices—to give a different price to customer A than customer B for the same product at the same time from the same store.

Derek Kravitz: “No one really knows that this is going on, and no one can really see behind the curtain how this algorithmic pricing works in practice.”

So we designed some tests where we would bring in volunteers, Consumer Reports members, to join us online—virtual shopping trips—and price goods from the same stores at the same time. And we started to see very clear signals, where people were grouped into distinct price buckets. And because of that, we could very clearly see that for the same box of Wheat Thins, there were five different price points, and those five different price points would range from, say, $3 to $5. But then, of course, if you extrapolate that over the cost of an entire grocery basket over the cost of an entire year, that can add up to real money if you are on the losing side of that equation. And the point of all this, too, is that no one really knows that this is going on, and no one can really see behind the curtain how this algorithmic pricing works in practice. And so we basically tried to uncover that, to show how it worked in the real world.

JJ: And I’m maybe going to bring you back to transparency in a second, but I just want to say, on that work, there were results from that investigation, right?

DK: Yeah, there was a reaction. We got a lot of reaction from consumers and shoppers who were upset that they were seeing different prices for the same goods than their neighbor. And we got a lot of reaction from state and federal officials, including the FTC, which launched a probe. The attorneys general of New York and California launched their own investigations. Instacart themselves stopped the practice of testing out different prices on customers about two weeks after our story.

And there’s still now dynamic and surveillance pricing legislation moving through statehouses across the country. Maryland just recently passed the first ban on personalized grocery prices in that state.

USA Today (4/15/26)

JJ: I think it’s very interesting that states are already passing bans. I think I saw a headline that was kind of like, “What Is Dynamic Pricing? Maryland Is Banning It,” and it sort of suggests a mislink. Something is galloping forward before people really understand even what it is, and that’s part of the problem, yeah?

DK: Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Maryland officials, when we interviewed them, said, we want to get ahead of this. We don’t quite understand how this works and what the underlying issue is for day-to-day consumers, but we can tell that this is going to be a problem if we don’t address it. And so they are trying and actually passed the law where you cannot personalize grocery prices down to the individual customer.

The problem there is that you can actually still segment customers. You can group them into really small numbers, say five, or ten, and offer those five or ten customers one price and a group of another five or ten customers a different price. In industry parlance, that’s segmentation; that’s the industry jargon for it. But the Maryland law just doesn’t address that yet.

But for them, this is a line in the sand, right? This is a first step in trying to really address this type of pricing tactic.

JJ: Well, because it seems that companies are sensitive to the problem. Certainly you can read about “managing the conception,” and “making consumers” just get used to it. So in other words, it’s not so much about selling it as just making it inevitable. And it’s funny, because we hear “if you build it, they will come,” and this seems to be “no, just build it and then make clear that there’s no other way for anybody to do anything except to work through this process.” It doesn’t match what we’re told is the idea of free enterprise, of building a better mousetrap, and people do it because they like it more.

DK: Yeah, at its core, algorithmic pricing is not capitalism at its base level, right? It’s extracting more money from individual shoppers for the same product or service, and it’s basically trying to increase a company’s margins, margins being the profit that they make on an individual product or service.

And, of course, this is a way to eke out more margins, greater margins, for companies. Grocery stores don’t make a lot of money. Their margins are low. It’s about 1 to 3%, for the most part, according to different trade groups. For them, this makes a lot of sense, to extract even very small percentages in additional margin, because it adds a ton of value to these companies.

Tennessean (3/10/26)

JJ: There was at least one direct response to this Instacart work that you did, which was an op-ed that I saw that said that the Instacart experiments were actually testing “market elasticity, not targeted profiling.” And you teased out how, during the pandemic, folks were relying on Instacart, particularly people with disabilities, people on SNAP benefits, people who couldn’t get out. And this person is saying, well, you’re saying that’s malice, and “we must distinguish economic reality from malice,” it said, which kind of gave me a chill.

But anyway, the point of this piece was–so don’t use the Instacart app, just go to the brick-and-mortar store and you can solve the whole problem. And that seems to me to be skipping over something important here.

DK: Just to demystify this a bit, we’ve actually investigated grocery chains themselves, too, in addition to Instacart and other retailers, and grocery chains have their own e-commerce platforms, their own mobile apps, their own online shopping, and they employ the same pricing strategies that Instacart does.

Consumer Reports (5/21/25)

We did a full investigation of the second-largest grocery chain in the United States, Kroger, which has a free “loyalty” program with 62 million consumer profiles, that you can access if you live in a state that has a law that allows for that direct access to personal company profiles, but, in essence, groups you into a particular segment for Kroger, and gives you personalized promotions and discounts. When half the store is discounted, that means that there’s no one true price, and that promotions and discounts end up being the ultimate true final price for a lot of products sold there.

So that’s all to say that, just because Instacart was caught or flagged in this particular instance, doesn’t mean that other retailers are not doing this. In fact, every retailer is doing this. It just depends on the amount and the gravity and the scale.

And one additional point: I’ve read all the op-eds, I’ve seen all the responses to this. I’ve read Instacart’s blog posts. We actually engaged with Instacart over the course of four months, four rounds of questions with about, I’d say, 50 questions. And they answered the vast majority of them. We shared all of our underlying data and all of our methodology, and they actually weighed in on that, and we incorporated that into our story.

That’s sort of Journalism 101. It’s actually the scientific method. We didn’t go in with a theory or a thesis that we had to prove or disprove. We were asking basic questions and then trying to figure out, is this a problem, or is this an issue? And clearly, the story speaks for itself, and Instacart’s response in that story speaks for itself.

So I really stress to people when they have an instinctual, sort of gut reaction to a company’s defending itself, or saying X, Y, Z, if a piece of journalism, or a piece of academic research, is fully reported out and actually looks and talks to the other side, and incorporates that into the work product, that means they’re doing due diligence. And it means you can actually take all of the information there at face value, as being a good-faith representation of what’s actually happening.

JJ: And start with transparency. I mean, transparency is the beginning and end, right? If you are making very clear your methods, and putting forward that back and forth, then folks can read it. I get tripped up when media trips into ideology, like, for example, in, and I’m going to unfortunately quote from this same person, but I think it’s important, this column, in opposing this Instacart research, says, “By forcing price uniformity and ‘parity’”—which is in scare quotes, “’parity’”:

we break the feedback loops that make these complex networks work. This likely forces companies to raise baseline prices for everyone or bake costs into higher service fees.

Now, there’s a lot going on there, but I love how companies are “forced” to raise prices for everyone. There’s never any other option. There’s never lower CEO pay. There’s never lower shareholder profits; they’re not an option. It’s always that capitalism works in a subtle way that you, dummy, don’t understand, and you’re breaking “feedback loops,” and that’s going to backfire, and it’s going to raise prices for everyone. I guess I object most vehemently to the patronizing of this kind of coverage.

DK: Without directly characterizing the messaging there, right, one thing I think we can confidently say, from a purely independent journalistic perspective, is that these systems, while the architecture of them, the tech, is complex, the end result is not. When you have five different prices for the same product, sold at the same time from the same store, that is price manipulation, that is profit maximization. That means that some customers win and some customers lose. And you don’t know if you are on the winning side of that equation or on the losing side of that equation. And that is the net result.

These systems, this tech, and especially things that involve large language models or AI—yes, they are incredibly sophisticated. They are incredibly complex, but the end result is not.

And that’s why I think customers and regulators are really responding to this, because they see the practical import, and the impact on real-life Americans, and they want to have a first-order conversation: “Do we want this? Is this something that we should allow, or should we structure things in a different way, where we address it before we let the tech set prices and do what it wants?”

And so I think that’s a really important thing to stress, is to just sort of step back, 30,000-foot view. Do we want this? And is this something that affects people? And the answer, clearly, on the latter point is yes. It is a huge impact on people’s pocketbooks, and it’s something that really affects Americans every single day in their financial lives.

PC World (3/28/25)

JJ: And just finally, in terms of our media, the space to have that conversation about, do we want this? Because what I’m now seeing is a wave of coverage that’s kind of like, “Here’s how you can take steps to counter algorithms.” So it seems like media are going to sell us the disease and then sell us the cure. So now I don’t need to just work 60 hours a week. I have to come home and puzzle out how to outsmart the supermarket so I can make my wages pay for food.

At a certain point, what do we ask of journalism, in terms of who they’re representing, who they’re speaking for, and whether they will provide the space to have that conversation that you’re talking about, about is this something we want?

DK: Yeah, and I’m glad you asked that last question, because when experts speak to what should consumers do, or how should they react with this information in hand: There’s differential pricing happening at the grocery store, or at a retailer or with a travel booking company; how should you respond? In a lot of cases, it means basically a prescription for a more Luddite existence, which is, again, not necessarily a salve for many people that rely on these services and that really have no other option.

But really, when you speak to experts and ask them: What should people do? a lot of them say: Go to a store, maybe a company or a brand, that doesn’t practice this type of surveillance or dynamic pricing en masse. Buy in bulk, because academic, peer-reviewed research shows that buying in bulk does reduce prices. Look at price labeling, and that’s required, usually, by weights and measures departments at the state level. Look at per-unit pricing. So when you want to compare prices, hopefully in a brick-and-mortar store, you can actually see the per-unit pricing and compare products, and shop accordingly. And go slow and have a shopping list and be deliberate about your interactions with companies.

Those are not really artful, sort of cool solutions, with an app you can download, or a browser extension you can download. But those are the things that actually, meaningfully help when you’re navigating this.

JJ: Well, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Derek Kravitz. He’s an investigative journalist with Consumer Reports. You can find their work on this and many other issues on ConsumerReports.org. Derek Kravitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DK: Thank you.

Marc Novicoff (Atlantic, 6/30/25): “The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”

If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.

“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced the Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”

It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President J.D. Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.

Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”

The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as the Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt or later retirement—or all three.”

But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals and economic inequality driving the narrative.

Hidden xenophobia

CNN (4/9/26): “Experts generally agree that a falling fertility rate can have real consequences—particularly related to the economy.”

The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.

In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.

But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023–24 than it did in 2003–04.

Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:

A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.

It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.

On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:

We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.

They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.

When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”

‘To save civilization, reject feminism’

Victor Joecks (Daily Signal, 8/10/25): “What’s needed is a change in society’s values. Modern feminism doesn’t view motherhood as something to celebrate but as the cause of female oppression.”

And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”

A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family and children while also valuing independence, career and financial stability”:

“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.

That’s a very sad development.

Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”

Joecks further opined:

Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.

‘National motherhood medal’

New York Times‘ Caroline Kitchener (4/21/25) on pronatalists: “If the birthrate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.”

Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.

The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”

‘Collapse of our civilization’

“Is It Here?” USA Today‘s headline (3/10/26) asks of a new baby boom. The article answers: “Not really, experts say—or at least not yet.”

The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s

warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.

Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”

That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.

It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.

Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.

‘The problem is teens’

Fox News senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26) warns teens: “You might want to have a kid but maybe as you get older you might not be able to.”

Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that

30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.

It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News‘ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:

The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15–19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.

In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:

If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.

Vanishing productivity

Alexander Puutio (Forbes, 6/9/25): “The global economy, led by the aging West and now followed by much of East Asia, has sprinted confidently into the abyss of demographic collapse.”

The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’s “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.

While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes‘ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).

The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that UN population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:

If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.

Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”

But it is clear what readers are being primed for: governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As the Atlantic piece concludes:

If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.

Productivity swamps demographics

“Many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force,” NPR (4/9/26) reported, “especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.” Why isn’t the story that anti-immigrant policies are a cause for concern, especially since Americans are shifting toward smaller families?

That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that

many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.

What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.

It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:

Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.

Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.

Not enough babies? Too many billionaires

“Fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare,” reports CNBC (5/30/25)—ignoring the fact that workers can move to your country if they aren’t born there.

The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker/retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.

Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”

An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)

But none other than the chief actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.

Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminate three-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.

Economic value judgments

ProPublica (6/8/21) revealed the shockingly low tax rates paid by the super-wealthy—suggesting another way besides immigration that social programs can be maintained in the face of declining birth rates.

And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super-rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of the Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014–18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).

So when the New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.

There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.

But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms and economic inequality mask the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.

CNN‘s Dana Bash (4/26/26) confronts Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) over Democrats saying Trump is “terrible for this country.”

After the thwarted attack at the White House Correspondents Dinner, some elite media have held straight faces as they decry violent rhetoric…from the left.

CNN’s Dana Bash (4/26/26) pressed congressmember Jamie Raskin:

You have, and as many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that when something like this happens?

Asked what rhetoric she had in mind, Bash came back with: “Well, just talking about some of the fact that he is terrible for this country and so on and so forth.”

‘When the guns are trained on her face’

The Atlantic (10/31/24) catalogued “40 instances in which the former president incited or praised violence against his fellow citizens.”

Bash is talking about the same Donald Trump that approvingly retweeted a guy saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” that celebrated the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller—“Good, I’m glad he’s dead”—and the murder of Rob Reiner, who Trump posted died

due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.

And who, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked with a hammer, joked that Pelosi was “against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house—which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

And this is of course setting to one side the mass murder of Palestinians, the lethal military strikes against Venezuelans in boats, the illegal kidnapping of immigrants off the streets, the deep and abiding harms to the poor and the marginalized—none of which count as being mean, evidently. Saying Haitians are killing and eating peoples’ pets? That wasn’t supposed to encourage any action…!

Saying of Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it…when the guns are trained on her face”—what’s that?

‘How does an investor process that?’

CNBC‘s Sara Eisen (4/7/26) wonders whether Trump’s genocidal threat is “a bigger upside risk or downside risk.”

Or how about Trump declaring that if Iran didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by—whatever deadline he had at the moment—“a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”?

Now, many would say that is more violent than saying Trump is “terrible for the country and so on and so forth.” Indeed, many would say it’s evidence of why he’s terrible for the country, and so on and so forth.

But Sara Eisen, co-host of CNBC’s Squawk on the Street (4/7/26), instead said:

This deadline that President Trump has set, 8:00 pm, has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?

Maybe Dana Bash and her ilk see nothing wrong with Eisen’s comments because, after all, that rhetoric isn’t “heated.” It’s just a calm, cold, consideration of how to consider mass murder from the profit angle. Like normal, decent people would do.

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Yahoo Finance (4/25/26)

This week on CounterSpin: A CNN headline a few months back told us that Instacart—which used to call itself a company that delivers groceries, but now, as its CEO told investors, is the “leading technology and enablement partner for the grocery industry”—was now using AI to “Gauge Customer Price Sensitivity.” “Price sensitivity” apparently means whether or not you care that you pay more for the same can of beans as another person—or, to be more clear, whether or not you notice. While some states look into banning it, so-called algorithmic or “dynamic” pricing is being presented by the corporate press as a fait accompli, the only question remaining being how to make sure consumers understand that they have no choice. We’ll hear more from investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, from Consumer Reports.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner attack.

Janine Jackson interviewed Drug Policy Alliance’s director of federal affairs Maritza Perez Medina about rescheduling marijuana for the April 24, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Scientific American (4/23/26)

Janine Jackson: Here in Manhattan, you can hardly throw a rock without hitting a cannabis store or dispensary, and see all stripe of people walking in. Marijuana, we understand, has now been officially “rescheduled“—that is, legally reclassified from a schedule I to a schedule III controlled substance, liking it less to heroin and more to Tylenol with codeine.

That’s an acknowledgement that marijuana has accepted medical uses and a lower abuse potential than previously acknowledged. We even heard conversation about how the new legal status of marijuana would come with some measure of repair for those who’ve been impacted by its criminalization. In other words, some people weren’t going to start making money off selling weed while other people still languished in prison for having it. But how is that part playing out?

Maritza Perez Medina is director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maritza Perez Medina.

Maritza Perez Medina: Yes. Thank you so much for having me today.

JJ: Let’s get right into it. I think many people are celebrating rescheduling, but what doesn’t it do, by itself, that maybe folks thought that it would?

MPM: Yeah. So one thing I want to clarify is the order that we saw today from the Department of Justice acknowledges that rescheduling marijuana, by moving it to schedule III of the CSA, means that there is medical value in marijuana, but I want to be clear that they only rescheduled medical marijuana. So medical marijuana that is state-licensed, or that is FDA-approved. It does not actually schedule recreational marijuana; that is still on schedule I.

They also announced that there would be a hearing to determine marijuana’s ultimate schedule on the CSA. They would like to see marijuana placed on schedule III permanently, and that would include recreational and medical marijuana, but that hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen until there’s a hearing. And that hearing is expected later this summer.

JJ: I feel as though, for as long as we’ve had conversations about any measure of legalizing marijuana, there have been people saying, “Well, you can’t just do that without talking about clearing folks’ records, without talking about investing in communities that have been harmed.” And I was pleasantly surprised by that conversation. So did that get dropped along the way? What’s happened?

ACLU (4/16/20)

MPM: It seems like it did, unfortunately. One thing that I try to communicate to folks is that they need to understand that moving marijuana on the CSA, which is what the Trump administration is doing, does not do anything for criminal cases, or have an impact on the criminal implications of marijuana use.

At the end of the day, marijuana remains prohibited as long as it remains on the CSA. So even if it is ultimately moved to schedule III, criminal penalties will remain in place unless marijuana is completely descheduled and removed from the Controlled Substances Act.

So that means that folks could still face prosecution, could still hold arrest and conviction records at the federal level, for marijuana use or activity. And it also means that people could still face damaging collateral consequences for marijuana activity, such as being detained or deported for marijuana use, even state-legal marijuana use. It could also mean that people will lose their ability to find employment, or keep their housing, or even receive benefits like SNAP to feed their families.

So, unfortunately, I do think that the human aspect has been lost in this discussion around rescheduling. Of course, it’s important to recognize that marijuana holds medical value, but I’m afraid that this order leaves behind people. People will remain susceptible to marijuana criminal penalties under rescheduling. And to fix that, what we actually need is a legislative solution through Congress.

JJ: I’m going to move you onto that, because then—let me just say, first, with my other guest, we were talking about homelessness, and how the punitive and carceral and, frankly, profiteering measures being pushed didn’t seem to really be about helping human beings experiencing homelessness. They’re about something else.

Politico (4/1/22)

And it’s hard not to feel that way about drug policy, that if the goal were really to fairly assess social harms, to help people who needed it, we’d be doing something different. Not a little tweak, but something different. And I’m guessing that’s where the MORE Act comes in.

MPM: Yes, absolutely. The MORE Act is a bill that lives in the House. It has actually passed the House twice at this point. We are hoping that we see movement of that bill, either in this Congress, but if Democrats are able to take back the majority, I do think we’ll see that bill move pretty quickly.

The MORE Act is a bill that would deschedule marijuana. It would remove marijuana completely from the Controlled Substances Act, which is essentially federal decriminalization of marijuana.

In addition to that, it would resentence marijuana convictions. It would provide expungements. It would reinvest marijuana tax revenue into communities that have been most harmed by the war on drugs, ensuring that folks can have access to legal services, quality education, health services, and other things that really build a healthy, happy life. It would also address the collateral consequences of marijuana convictions, ensuring that people can no longer be detained or deported or lose their federal benefits because of marijuana use.

Drug Policy Alliance (8/28/25)

So it really is a far-ranging, comprehensive bill that tries to address criminal justice issues, human rights issues, but, really, the bill is grounded in equity and social justice and human rights, which is why it’s the bill that we support, and are always excited to try to push through Congress.

JJ: Yeah. I think there’s an odd view that you can structurally, systematically, culturally harm people for decades—as you note, people couldn’t get jobs, they couldn’t get housing, due to marijuana convictions—and then just say, “OK, we removed the barrier. Now any problems you have are your own fault,” without actually redressing and looking at those harms that have been done, and that don’t suddenly disappear when you reschedule marijuana.

MPM: Yeah, absolutely. There are lasting consequences in people’s lives when laws change, and those laws should be inclusive of that. They definitely need to look back at the harm that’s been done.

JJ: You stated it, but what is the status of the MORE Act? Where are you seeing support for it, and where do the barriers remain to its passage?

MPM: Yeah. So the bill has very broad support from the Democratic Party, which is why it was able to pass when Democrats were heading the House. And, again, it’s passed twice at this point.

Where we lack support is really with Republicans. And right now Republicans are the majority in Congress. So it’s very unlikely that this bill will move in a Republican Congress, but of course if that changes, then we’ll see support for the bill again. That is one frustrating aspect of working on marijuana reform at the federal level, is that there really are huge differences in what the parties support when it comes to comprehensive federal marijuana reform.

JJ: Right. And I think a lot of folks don’t understand that what might be happening in their city, or even their state, is different than what the federal law is saying and doing.

MPM: Absolutely. Yeah. There are so many people who think because marijuana is legal at the state level, because they have a medical marijuana license and are able to partake in the medical market, or even the recreational market, they might think they have a level of protection. And they do at the state and local level, if they’re following the law.

But unfortunately, because marijuana remains a Schedule I drug on the Controlled Substances Act at the federal level, folks can still be implicated for federal crimes. People can still face federal consequences.

One way this shows up is for noncitizens. There are many noncitizens who partake in the market, either as consumers or laborers, not realizing that because of federal prohibition, it could really jeopardize their immigration status. This is another reason we support full descheduling, because we want to make sure that people have full protections.

CounterSpin (1/12/18)

JJ: Finally, when I was talking about this back in 2018 with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, we were talking about then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions at that point saying, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” That was the level of the conversation at that point. And I think folks will understand that, yes, it’s very different now. The conversation, the public understanding, might be different now, and yet, and yet, and yet.

I wonder, finally, what role you think journalism could be playing now. What should they stop doing? What could they do more of?

MPM: Yeah. I think one thing that certainly helps make change is when culture changes, and certainly the media play a big role in cultural change. For far too long, people who use any sort of drugs, marijuana or not, have been highly stigmatized in all media, and popular culture generally. We need to change that in order to actually place laws that are based in reality, based on public health, equity and human rights. So the media could help by reporting the facts, and not stigmatizing individuals who use drugs.

JJ: I would add, just personally, weed is like, it’s everywhere in media. It’s cool, it’s OK, it’s great, it’s a cool thing to do. And it just, to me, that erases the harms that are still happening underneath the surface. If you watch media, it seems like everyone smokes weed, and it’s all fine, and yet that’s not the reality.

Maritza Perez Medina: “There are people who are serving decades-long sentences for marijuana….They’ve been really punished for what others are making so much money off of.”

MPM: Absolutely. I think that’s a really good point, when it comes to marijuana specifically. In the same vein, I find it frustrating when people make light of marijuana and joke about marijuana. We see lawmakers do this all the time.

But to me, it’s a very serious issue, because of what you just said. There are people who are serving decades-long sentences for marijuana. That means they haven’t seen their families for decades. They’ve been really punished for what others are making so much money off of. That, to me, feels very unjust, and it doesn’t feel like a laughing matter.

So that’s one personal frustration with lawmakers. You think this is a joke, which means that you’re not taking it seriously, and not passing laws to change it. And that needs to change.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Maritza Perez Medina from Drug Policy Alliance. You can find their work on this and other issues online at DrugPolicy.org. Maritza Perez Medina, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MPM: Yeah, thank you.

WAFB (4/15/26)

Janine Jackson: “Louisiana House Advances Bill to Criminalize Public Camping” is how many headlines have it, but the bill moving through the Louisiana legislature does more than make it a crime to sleep outside—creating a Dickensian alternate legal system to ensnare homeless people that one advocacy group describes as evoking “debtors’ prisons, convict leasing and the ugliest days of Jim Crow.”

What ideas and what people are driving cruelty like this, and how are people pushing back? Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center, and leads the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jesse Rabinowitz.

Jesse Rabinowitz: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: It’s not law yet, I don’t think, but explain, if you would, what this Louisiana measure wants to do, what it would do if fully enacted.

Truthout (1/19/26)

JR: Sure. This Louisiana bill takes a bad idea and makes it even worse. So we know that the far-right-wing billionaires at the Cicero Institute, which is a think tank founded by a former Palantir founder with close ties to the Trump administration, has been peddling these anti-homeless bills in states across the country for several years now.

And what Louisiana has done is taken their cookie-cutter bill, which makes it, in part, illegal to camp outside, and made it a whole lot worse by adding this provision that says that homeless people are subject to a different legal system than everybody else, and that homeless people could be sentenced to undefined “treatment” that they will then have to pay for out of pocket. And if they can’t afford to pay for it, that they can be sent to do labor for the government or a nonprofit organization.

This is bringing back debtors’ prisons, convict leasing, and creating a tiered country where people, by virtue of not being able to afford rent, are subject to a different set of justice. It’s just awful.

JJ: The idea that, like, “Well, you’re living on the street, so give us some money”—I mean, that doesn’t pass a sniff test. It doesn’t seem like it’s even trying to do what it’s saying it’s doing. It’s not that people are just sitting on hundreds of dollars and then choosing to camp out. It’s weird.

JR: You’re absolutely right. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case of Johnson v. Grants Pass, which shamefully ruled that cities can arrest or ticket people for sleeping outside, even when they have nowhere else to go. And in the past two years, over 300 cities have passed laws that make it a crime to be homeless. Many of them include things like a thousand dollars in fines. If folks had a thousand dollars, they wouldn’t be sleeping outside. If folks had the money to pay for treatment in Louisiana, they wouldn’t be sleeping outside.

But we know that their goal is not actually to help people, because if they were interested in helping people and solving homelessness, they would focus on the things that we know work, like housing and support. Their goal is to scapegoat and target homeless people, to push homeless people out of cities and into government-run detention camps. And that very thing has already happened in Louisiana, which is why this bill is so scary.

JJ: Just to take a beat for a second, these are coercive things that you would never wish on somebody you cared about, but they’re presented as appropriate or even necessary for “those people,” which is already part of a dehumanization that I think is key here. But I want to lift up how this masquerades, if you’re not paying attention, as concern, because “treatment,” after all, it sounds like, “Well, treatment, these people need help. Maybe they don’t know they need help.” But “treatment” sounds positive if you don’t know what’s actually being talked about.

Jesse Rabinowitz: “We need to focus on the real cause of homelessness, which is the fact that rent in this country is just too damn high for more and more people to afford.”

JR: Absolutely. And I say this as a mental health professional; mental health treatment is amazing. It has impacted my life. It is a good thing. There’s not enough voluntary treatment and voluntary services to go around. I know of so many people, both people experiencing homelessness, but also people who have high-paying jobs, who would love to get into therapy or treatment, but can’t find an opening.

This bill doesn’t expand providers. It doesn’t expand services. It doesn’t expand care. All it does is expand this idea that people experiencing homelessness are different than everybody else. But the truth is, most people are just one missed paycheck away from losing their housing, and we need to focus on the real cause of homelessness, which is the fact that rent in this country is just too damn high for more and more people to afford.

JJ: Let’s talk a little bit more, because people say the cruelty is the point, not just because of the obvious lack of compassion that we see from some of these people, their evident despising of people without homes, and of poor people.

But it’s also because, and you’ve tipped this, if the goal were really to get folks off the street, it’s not a mystery how we would achieve that. We do have evidence. If that’s really the goal, we have evidence of what can work. Yep?

JR: Absolutely. I was a homeless outreach worker in DC, working with folks who lived outside with severe and persistent mental illness. None of those folks were living outside because they wanted to. They were all living outside because they had nowhere else to go.

But I saw with my own two eyes that when the client got matched to housing and supports that met their needs, they moved off the streets, they moved into housing, and they were able to get their lives back on track. Housing and services work; there’s just not nearly enough of it to go around. And the Trump administration is talking about cutting programs that we know work, which will make homelessness worse.

NOLA.com (4/11/26)

JJ: Well, they work because they help homeless people. And one gets the feeling that that’s not the kind of work that some folks want to be done. I hate to bring it back to cruelty, but it does seem as though there’s some weird—I mean, Louisiana Gov. [Jeff] Landry, for example, points to Donald Trump’s attacks on homeless people as his model and as justification. There’s a miasma of just cruelty. It seems to me that is what is driving this, and not an actual desire to get people off the street and into housing.

JR: I absolutely agree with you. Their desire is not to solve homelessness. Their desire is to use homelessness, and to target people experiencing homelessness, and make that a political football to enact an authoritarian regime, to stoke the flames of white supremacy and to deflect from this administration’s failures to actually help everyday people: Rent is more expensive, gas is more expensive, food is more expensive.

But people across the country actually agree with us. We have poll after poll that shows most people reject the idea of making it a crime to be homeless. And most people recognize the solution to homelessness is housing, not handcuffs.

We need our politicians to do their job and make sure that everybody, regardless of what they look like, where they come from, what they do, has a safe place to live. Louisiana is taking the backwards and easy way out, but it’s actually not going to solve homelessness. It’s going to make homelessness worse.

JJ: And I think some of us thought that maybe we’d got past the “individual moral failing” understanding of poverty, that we had advanced to a more structural understanding of how those conditions are created. As we know, we’ve been rocketing backwards into the past for some time now.

And just to say, this isn’t something to tweak. It’s not that these cut-and-paste anti-homeless laws that we’re seeing around the country need fixing. We need a whole different understanding, don’t we, of why things are as they are, and a different vision of how things can be?

JR: Absolutely. Consistent with their agenda, the Trump administration is trying to move us backwards. They are trying to move us backwards to a time of massive mental health institutions, of making homeless people jump through impossible hoops. And we used to do those things as a country, and we stopped doing them because they were both unjust and they simply didn’t work.

But we know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We have more than enough money in this country, more than enough brain power and expertise, to make sure that everybody has a safe place to live. And most people want everybody to have a safe place to live. And we have to build a housing system that works for people and not for profit.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have any thoughts about reporting in this regard. Is there anything you’d like to see more of, or perhaps less of, when it comes to media talking about these issues?

Teaching the Holocaust: “Asocials”

JR: I really want the media and everyone to understand that the targeting of homelessness has, throughout history, been a tactic of authoritarian regimes. Just like people are rightfully outraged about the targeting of migrants, of queer folks, so too we have to understand that this purposeful targeting of homeless people is out of an authoritarian textbook.

But what starts with homeless folks isn’t going to stop there. They’re going to come for everyone that they don’t like, or they disagree with, which is why we all collectively have to stand up together and say, “No, we are not going to accept this. We are not going to accept a society where people that the administration doesn’t like are forced into detention camps or into jail.” Instead, we have to channel people’s rightful outrage to build a system that works for the many and not for the few.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jesse Rabinowitz from the National Homelessness Law Center. You can follow their work online at HomelessLaw.org. Jesse Rabinowitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JR: Thanks for having me.

The New York Times‘ Luke Broadwater (4/26/26) wrongly wrote that Donald Trump was “the first current or former US president to face an assassination attempt since 1981.”

Following the shooting incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the New York Times (4/26/26) wrote:

On July 13, 2024, Mr. Trump became the first current or former US president to face an assassination attempt since 1981, when a bullet nicked his ear while he was giving a speech in Butler.

That is absurdly wrong; there have been numerous efforts to kill current or former US presidents since 1981, many of which were covered in real time by the New York Times.

In 1993, there was allegedly a plot to kill former President George Bush—the first one—on a visit to Kuwait. “Clinton Administration officials said tonight that they now believe that Iraqi saboteurs sought to assassinate George Bush during the former president’s visit to Kuwait,” the Times (5/8/93) reported. “The Kuwaitis said they had seized two cars loaded with remote-controlled explosives that were intended to kill Mr. Bush and his entourage.” There are questions about whether this plot was invented by the Kuwaiti government (New York Times,  10/25/93), but the Clinton administration took it seriously enough to bomb Iraq in retaliation for it (New York Times, 6/28/93).

The 1994 attack on the White House is one of numerous assassination attempts that have gone down the New York Times‘ memory hole.

A year later, the Times (10/30/94) reported that “a 26-year-old Colorado man carrying a Chinese-made semi-automatic rifle sprayed the north face of the White House with a score or more of bullets.” President Bill Clinton was inside at the time, but was unharmed. The gunman, Francisco Martin Duran, was later convicted of attempted assassination (New York Times, 6/30/95).

In 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian threw a live grenade at George W. Bush during a speech Bush was giving in the former Soviet republic of Georgia (New York Times, 7/22/05). The grenade reportedly didn’t go off because the firing pin had been wrapped too tightly in a handkerchief (FBI, 1/11/06).

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez shot up the White House with a semi-automatic rifle in 2011. The Times (11/17/11) reported:

Federal authorities on Thursday charged a 21-year-old Idaho man with attempting to assassinate President Obama—saying he had told one friend that the president was “the Antichrist” and that he “needed to kill him.”

Obama was repeatedly sent letters laced with the nerve toxin ricin (NPR, 5/20/14; CNN, 7/16/14).

These are among the more prominent presidential assassination attempts since 1981; many others were stopped by law enforcement before they got so far.

This is not mere history trivia; by erasing the long record of attempted violence against US presidents, the New York Times plays into Donald Trump’s martyr complex, and makes it more likely that the government will take draconian action against a problem that the United States has lived with for decades.

ACTION: Please tell the New York Times to correct its false report about the uncommonness of presidential assassination attempts.

CONTACT: corrections@nytimes.com

The Washington Post (4/8/26) asserts that “the Islamic Republic stands to lose more from the war resuming than Washington does”—though Trump’s plummeting approval ratings might suggest otherwise.

In the wake of the temporary US/Iran ceasefire, hawkish commentary in leading American newspapers advanced the premise that the US can dictate terms to Iran in negotiations, with a faith in the power of Washington’s military might that was hard to justify by the previous course of the war.

A Washington Post editorial (4/8/26) contended:

Despite the massive damage inflicted upon the country by the US in recent weeks, the regime acts like it holds the cards. Its leaders are demanding the US pull all troops out of the Middle East and accept Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. The question is why Trump would bend over backward to keep obviously unserious talks on track.

Whether the Post likes it or not, Iran has a decent hand to play. For instance, Iranian drones cost just $20,000 to produce, and the US uses missiles that cost $4 million each to try and destroy them (Bloomberg, 3/2/26). Less than three weeks into the war, the US was already estimated to have spent more than $18 billion attacking Iran (Guardian, 3/19/26). The longer Iran can hold out, the more it financially bleeds the US.

The majority of Americans already consistently oppose the war (NBC News, 4/1/26) and, as costs spiral, domestic opposition to the US’s assault is likely to grow. In this context, the paper may need to revise its definition of seriousness to include accepting that Iran has the power to resist US bullying and bluster.

‘More work to degrade’

An intelligence source tells CNN (4/2/26) that Iran is “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

The Washington Post editorial also said that there “is still more work to be done to degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities and its capacity to rebuild them.” “Offensive” here is a propaganda term, as Iran has not launched an aggressive war in nearly two centuries—unlike the United States and Israel, which have attacked Iran twice in the last year.

By reversing victim and offender, the Post was transparently calling for the US to resume bombing Iran; after all, it’s through war that one country “degrades” another’s military capacity. But it’s not that the US and Israel didn’t try to destroy Iranian capabilities; rather, they tried and have not succeeded.

Less than a week before the ceasefire, a CNN report (4/2/26) said US intelligence had assessed that

roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal, despite the daily pounding by US and Israeli strikes against military targets over the past five weeks….

The intelligence, compiled in recent days, also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, the sources said, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets, though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran retained that capacity despite the US hitting more than 12,300 targets in Iran, according to US Central Command. Israel, for its part, said it had dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran since February 28 (Jerusalem Post, 3/25/26).

The Post offered no insight into why it believes the US/Israeli assault will suddenly become more effective.

‘Finish the job’

“If the [Iranian] regime behaves as it always has, it will claim to want to reach a deal but never will,” the Wall Street Journal (4/8/26) writes—stuffing the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement down the memory hole.

The next test for Mr. Trump will be whether he takes his two-week ceasefire deadline seriously. If he does, and Iran plays its usual games, then he really will have to “finish the job.”

Such calls overlook the limits to US war-making capacity. Analysts at Colorado’s Payne Institute for Public Policy, cited by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (4/1/26), “assessed that the US had lost nearly 46% of its Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS),” one of the US’s main tactical ballistic weapons. Likewise, they estimated that

supplies of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems, used by the US and its partners in the region to defend against Iranian missiles, were also dropping significantly. Projections showed the THAAD interceptors could run out by mid-April.

The US also burned through 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the war’s first four weeks, “a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials” (Washington Post, 3/27/26). Meanwhile, the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors that Israel used against Iran’s longer-range missiles “were also projected to be exhausted by the end of March” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 4/1/26). Unlike the Journal’s lust for violence, the US/Israeli arsenal is finite.

‘Circle of death’

Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 4/8/26) asserts that Trump can “bring the war to a final and decisive conclusion…in a matter of weeks”—disregarding the fact that nearly six weeks of all-out war were far from decisive.

Nor did these constraints prevent the Washington Post‘s Marc A. Thiessen (4/8/26) from calling on Trump to create a “circle of death” around any former nuclear sites in Iran, and enforce it by “killing any Iranian who enters that circle.” He also suggested another round of assassinations, “eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations,” so that the country’s leaders understand that if they fail to reach “a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking…they will be killed.”

Murderous fantasies about the US imposing total domination over Iran are perhaps a symptom of the US being unable to do so in reality. As Thiessen’s own paper (4/3/26) reported, despite the US/Israeli assassinations of high-ranking Iranian officials,

Iran has continued to launch retaliatory attacks, often hitting high-value targets, demonstrating sustained command and control beyond the conflict’s initial days when units largely operated on autopilot under Iran’s “mosaic” defense strategy, which emphasizes decentralized autonomy. In recent weeks, Iranian attacks have struck critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, industrial and energy sites in Israel, and key US military installations, including a direct strike on an advanced US spy plane.

In other words, decapitating the Iranian government hasn’t caused it to capitulate or prevented it from responding to US/Israeli attacks, but Thiessen—for reasons he did not explain—thinks that doing the same thing again will produce a different result.

Thiessen also said that the US should

develop and implement a covert action plan to support the Iranian opposition…. Such a plan could involve supplying the Iranian opposition with weapons, much as the US once provided arms to anti-Communist “freedom fighters” across the world.

The overriding goal should be to help the Iranian people, over time, bring down this murderous regime.

Set aside that this plan would violate the UN Charter’s principle of nonintervention and that the US has zero right to shape who governs Iran. In reality, multiple US intelligence reports conclude that Iran’s government “is not in danger” of falling (Reuters, 3/11/26). Israeli officials also think that Iran’s government “isn’t likely to fall soon” (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/26).

While there’s little reason to believe that Thiessen’s proposal would produce regime change in Iran, we can be fairly confident that flooding Iran with weapons will have the same outcome that flooding countries with arms generally has—namely, a devastating bloodbath for its inhabitants (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17; Jacobin, 9/11/21).

‘The easiest method’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 4/14/26) advises Trump to “keep turning the screws on the regime’s leaders”—a torture metaphor from an advocate of actual torture.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times (4/14/26) likewise wrote from an alternate reality where the war showed that the US can impose its will on Iran. Stephens opened by quoting his own piece (4/7/26) from the previous week :

“The easiest method for the United States to reopen Hormuz,” I wrote last Tuesday, “is to start seizing tankers carrying Iranian crude once they reach the Arabian Sea.”

It’s not clear why Stephens thought seizing Iranian ships would cause Iran to back down. After all, assassinating many of the country’s leaders, attacking Iranian health facilities (Al Jazeera, 4/3/26) and vital civilian infrastructure (BBC, 3/19/26), and mass-murdering Iranian school girls (Guardian, 3/3/26) did not compel the country to stop defending itself.

Stephens went on to contend:

Trump should put Iran’s regime to a fundamental choice: It can have an economy. Or the regime can attempt to have a nuclear program while trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. But it can’t have both.

This quote suggests Stephens was unwilling to seriously grapple with Iran’s retaliatory power. For example, Iran has consistently responded to US aggression by attacking the empire’s regional nodes, killing Israelis (BBC, 3/1/26; Reuters, 4/6/26) and badly damaging Israeli infrastructure (Al Jazeera, 3/21/26).

Iranian countermeasures have likewise hit energy infrastructure in the US’s client states in the Gulf, leading—for example—to fires at Kuwaiti oil and petrochemical facilities, at a petrochemical plant in the UAE and at a storage tank in Bahrain (AFP, 4/5/26). In other words, Iran has illustrated that it has a multitude of options for raising the costs of US violence, indicating it would likely continue exercising these in the scenario Stephens advocates.

‘Broke the petrodollar’

Aaron Brown (Bloomberg, 4/6/26) notes that while investment generally flows into the US Treasury in times of crisis, “the calculus changes when the US itself is the belligerent.”

None of these commentators acknowledge what is likely the strongest blow that Iran has landed against the US. The Islamic Republic has undermined what’s called the petrodollar regime, a system in which the US promises to militarily protect the Gulf monarchies in exchange for these states putting money they earn from oil sales into US assets—most notably Treasury bonds. The arrangement, which has been in place since 1974, subsidizes US borrowing costs and keeps the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency.

Bloomberg (4/6/26) reports that the war on Iran “broke the petrodollar,” because the conflict is “categorically different” from other political, military and economic crises of the post-1974 period:

Gulf producers can’t get their oil out. The Strait of Hormuz closure has stranded their barrels along with everyone else’s.

Gulf states including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively cut production by at least 10 million barrels per day in March. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can export reduced volumes through alternative pipelines. But those routes handle only about a quarter of normal Strait throughput at full capacity, and they are under active Iranian drone and missile threat. Qatar declared force majeure on exports of liquified natural gas after strikes on its Ras Laffan facility.

Thus, Iran has shown that it can hinder, and possibly destroy, a central plank in the architecture of the US empire. Stephens, Thiessen and the editorial boards of the Journal and the Post appear to be deluding themselves about the gravity of this development. Iran has successfully resisted subjugation, largely by jeopardizing a key instrument of US global hegemony, but these authors have gone on writing as if Washington were in a position to force Iran to surrender to its diktats.

These observers traffic in illusions about a virtually omnipotent US that can indefinitely control the world through force of arms, consequence-free. Op-ed writing is supposed to be persuasive. In that regard, these authors have failed spectacularly.

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NHLC (3/24/26)

This week on CounterSpin: From the federal level on down, many laws and policies that claim to be about “ending homelessness” seem to be clearly more about hurting homeless people than changing their circumstance. Even if you, or anyone you know, has never been unhoused: How hard is it to understand the difference between charging poor people monetary fines they obviously can’t pay, and then throwing them in jail when they don’t—and addressing homelessness with, oh I don’t know, housing?

That would be a commonsense conversation, about what resources we have and how we deploy them; but instead we see power actors, with the support of the White House and the Supreme Court, telling us that “ending homelessness” means tearing up people’s tents, throwing away their belongings; a new law in Kentucky says officials can use “stand your ground” laws to shoot homeless people that don’t “cooperate” with their eviction from private or public land.

So: Is this really about addressing homelessness? Because we know how to do that. And if it’s not: What is it about? And can we have an honest conversation about that?

Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center. We hear from him this week.

Marijuana Moment (12/18/25)

Also on the show: You may think weed is “legal” because you see so many people smoking it on the street. Including your grandma and your next-door neighbor who just a few years back would’ve called the cops. But just as the criminalization of marijuana affected different communities very differently, the current supposed de-criminalization continues to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Though that is not at all the understanding you would get from a casual view, or for that matter from media coverage that makes it seem like the debate over weed is all over, and now we’re all just talking about which strain is the best.

Maritza Perez Medina is director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us to talk about what the “rescheduling” of marijuana does and doesn’t do.

With both homelessness and drug policy, it’s useful to see how many current legislative measures, with a cultural backwind from corporate media, are fooling people that things have changed, while actually things are still harming the people who have always been harmed. So these moves are not something to “tweak”; we need conversation and action based on a different understanding of why things are as they are, and of how things can be.