Substacks
Watch this Service for Julian Assange in Oslo, Norway where I preached the sermon “The Crucifixion of Julian Assange” and actor and director Liv Ullmann read the scripture lessons. Chris Hedges

Hebrew Bible Reading:
Jeremiah 37 11- 21
And it came to pass, that when the army of the Chaldeans was broken up from Jerusalem for fear of Pharaoh’s army,
Then Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem to go into the land of Benjamin, to separate himself thence in the midst of the people.
And when he was in the gate of Benjamin, a captain of the ward was there, whose name was Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Hananiah; and he took Jeremiah the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away to the Chaldeans.
Then said Jeremiah, It is false; I fall not away to the Chaldeans. But he hearkened not to him: so Irijah took Jeremiah, and brought him to the princes.
Wherefore the princes were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him, and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan the scribe: for they had made that the prison.
When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cabins, and Jeremiah had remained there many days;
Then Zedekiah the king sent, and took him out: and the king asked him secretly in his house, and said, Is there any word from the Lord? And Jeremiah said, There is: for, said he, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon.
Moreover Jeremiah said unto king Zedekiah, What have I offended against thee, or against thy servants, or against this people, that ye have put me in prison?
Where are now your prophets which prophesied unto you, saying, The king of Babylon shall not come against you, nor against this land?
Therefore hear now, I pray thee, O my lord the king: let my supplication, I pray thee, be accepted before thee; that thou cause me not to return to the house of Jonathan the scribe, lest I die there.
Then Zedekiah the king commanded that they should commit Jeremiah into the court of the prison, and that they should give him daily a piece of bread out of the bakers’ street, until all the bread in the city were spent. Thus Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.
New Testament Readings:
Matthew 4:1-17
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Mr. Fish
I dedicate this sermon to my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, Bishop Krister Stendhal.
Prophets are notoriously difficult people. They are not saints. They are people of agony, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, whose “life and soul are at stake.” The prophet is moved by human anguish. Prophets are not soothsayers. They do not divine the future. Injustice, for the prophet, “assumes almost cosmic proportions.” A prophet, consumed by an unnatural fury, gives witness to “the divine pathos.” “God,” Heschel writes, “is raging in the prophet’s words.” He or she stands unflinchingly with the crucified of the earth, even to the point of their own destruction. “While the world is at ease and asleep,” Heschel writes, “the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet says “No” to his or her society, “condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.” And the prophet “is often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his [or her] heart desires.”
Prophets believe in justice even when the world around them says there will be no justice. It is not that they transcend reality. It is that they are compelled to strike out against it, refusing to be silent no matter how hard life becomes. They are gripped by what Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness in the soul,” for “nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power” and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” This madness is dangerous, but vital because without it “truth is obscured.” Liberalism, Niebuhr goes on, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
But as the priest Amaziah says of the prophet Amos, “The land is not able to bear all his words.”
The Biblical prophets — Elijah, Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah — believed that anything worth living for was worth dying for. Their enemy was not only suffering, calumny, poverty, injustice, but a life devoid of meaning. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” the civil rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth said. Prophets cannot be intimidated. They cannot be bought. They are single-mindedly obsessed. James Baldwin, himself a prophet, understands. He writes:
“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”
The powerful and the rich make war on the prophet. They slander and insult the prophet. They question the prophet’s sanity and motives. They make it hard for the prophet to survive removing the prophet’s meager source of income. They punish and marginalize those who stand with the prophet. They silence the prophet’s voice, through censorship, imprisonment and often murder. The list of martyred prophets is long. Socrates. Joan of Arc. Isaac Babel. Federico García Lorca. Miklós Radnóti. Irène Némirovsky. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Victor Jara. Ken Saro-Wiwa.
The truth grips the prophet so that he or she is bound so strongly to it that nothing but death can separate them from it. In that truth they find God.
“One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” Simone Weil writes. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”
Who crucified Jesus? Organized religion. Organized politics. Organized business.
The executioners have not changed. They simply changed the story, created a counterfeit gospel, as the poet Langston Hughes writes:
Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon –
But that day’s gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible –
But it’s dead now.
The popes and the preachers’ve
Made too much money from it.
They’ve sold you to many
Kings, generals, robbers, and killers –
Even to the Tzar and Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain’t no good no more.
They’ve pawned you
Till you’ve done wore out.
The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 B.C. in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in Bithynia, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than 30 years since he led his army across the Alps and annihilated Roman legions. Rome was only able to save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics.
It did not matter that there had been over 20 Roman consuls since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He had humiliated Rome. He had punctured its myth of omnipotence. And he would pay. With his life. Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 B.C. by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of Empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est — Carthage must be destroyed. Nothing about Empire, from then until now, has changed.
Imperial powers do not forgive those who make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of Empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, corruption, lies, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate mass violence against innocents and state terror.
The current American Empire, damaged and humiliated by troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one despotic voice.
Julian, for this reason, is undergoing a slow-motion execution. Seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Four years in Belmarsh Prison. He ripped back the veil on the dark machinations of the U.S. Empire, the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies, the corruption, the brutal suppression of those who attempt to speak the truth. The Empire intends to make him pay. He is to be an example to anyone who might think of doing what he did.
Julian had other options. His genius and his skill as a computer programmer and cryptographer would have seen him highly compensated by security agencies, private contractors or Silicon Valley. He could have made a very comfortable living if he served the Empire. His soul, as Christopher Marlow shows us in Doctor Faustus, would have atrophied and died, like the souls of all who prostitute themselves to power, but the material rewards would have been significant. He would have been a success, at least a success as measured by the powerful and the wealthy.
Satan tempts Jesus by offering him power, “all the kingdoms of the world,” accompanied by glory and authority.
“If you, then, will worship me,” Satan says, “it will all be yours.”
This temptation is the fatal disease of those who serve power and with it the hubris and avarice that hastens, as the prophet Amos says, “the reign of violence.”
And yet these malevolent forces are not the most dangerous.
“When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime…the most important lesson I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems,” Rabbi Joachim Prinz says. “The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem, is silence.”
Julian’s crucifixion is a public spectacle. It is not hidden. And yet we watch passively. We do not flood the streets with our protests. We do not condemn the executioners, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We give his crucifixion our silent consent. W. H. Auden in Musee des Beaux Arts writes:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Sacrifice, self-sacrifice, is the cost of discipleship. But few are willing to pay that price. We prefer to look away from suffering, a boy falling out of the sky. And it is our indifference, and with our indifference, our complicity, that condemns all prophets.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical priest Father Daniel Berrigan, who spent two years in a federal prison for burning draft records during the Vietnam War, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood”:
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Bearing the cross, living in truth, is not about the pursuit of happiness. It does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress. It is not about achieving wealth, celebrity or power. It entails sacrifice. It is about our neighbor. The organs of state security monitor and harass you. They amass huge files on your activities. They disrupt your life. They throw you in prison, even when, like Julian, you did not commit a crime. It is not a new story. Nor is our indifference to evil; palpable evil we can see in front of us, new.
In the reading from the Hebrew Bible we hear the story of the prophet Jeremiah. He, like Julian, exposed the corruption and lust for war by the powerful. He warned of the catastrophe that inevitably comes when the covenant with God is broken. He condemned idolatry, the corruption of kings, priests and false prophets. Jeremiah was arrested, beaten and put in stocks. He was forbidden from preaching. An attempt was made on his life. After Egypt was conquered by Babylon, and Judea began to prepare for war, Jeremiah delivered an oracle warning the king to maintain peace. King Zedekiah ignored him. Babylon besieged Jerusalem. Jeremiah was arrested and imprisoned. He was freed by the Babylonians after Jerusalem’s conquest, but was exiled to Egypt, where, according to the Biblical tradition, he was stoned to death.
Jeremiah, like Julian, understood that a society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.
Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family. Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him end. Yes, we honor him for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian’s liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom, and truth, of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.
Tyrannies, from Biblical times to the present, invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such as Julian, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.
The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism,” a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.
I was in the London courtroom during Julian’s extradition hearing overseen by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”, demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was a judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spiedon Julian in the embassy through the Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the hearing. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological, if not physical disintegration.
The U.S. government directed London barrister James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was a judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public; limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard, and at times impossible, to access the hearing online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence, but the Lubyanka.
Prophets call for justice in an unjust world. What they demand is not radical. On the political spectrum it is conservative. The restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.
The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have done by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.
In Oct. 2010, WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs. The War Logs documented numerous U.S. war crimes — including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the “Collateral Murder” video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians who approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints. The towering civil rights attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael Ratner— who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadoran Embassy — met with Julian in a studio apartment in Central London. Julian’s personal bank cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing U.S. war crimes had disappeared from his luggage en route to London. Swedish police were fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, was about extraditing Julian to the United States.
“WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political,” Weinglass told Julian. “As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn’t like the truth coming out. And it doesn’t like to be humiliated. No matter if it’s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it. We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the publisher.”
“Come after me for what?” asked Julian.
“Espionage,” Weinglass continued. “They’re going to charge Bradley Manning with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don’t think it applies to him because he’s a whistleblower, not a spy. And we don’t think it applies to you either because you are a publisher. But they are going to try to force Manning into implicating you as his collaborator.”
“Come after me for what?’
That is the question.
They came after Julian not for his vices, but his virtues.
They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo; because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords (part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003); because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime; that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because Julian exposed the contents of the speeches Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs for which she was paid $675,000, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform; because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smart phones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.
Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling class And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. “Red Rosa now has vanished too,” Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”
We have undergone a corporate coup, where poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded.
To refuse to fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain. Those in power must feel our wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience, it means constant acts of social and political disruption, for this organized power from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will free Julian. Politics is a game of fear. It is our moral and civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid.
The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It has abolished the rule of law. It obscures and falsifies the truth. It seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power. But to do this, we must, as Julian has done, as all prophets have done, pick up the cross and bear its awful weight on our back.
“This is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people…” Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us. “The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up the cross, with all its difficulties agonizing and tension-packed content and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us, to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering…When I took up the cross, I recognized its meaning…The cross is something you bear, and ultimately that you die on.”
“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” Augustine writes. “Their names are anger and courage;anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”
Those who hold fast to the eternal and the sacred, to truth, as the sociologist Emile Durkeim understood, are not merely those who see new truths of which most others are ignorant, but are men and women, possessed by sublime madness, who are driven by a transcendent force that allows them to endure the trials of existence or conquer them. They transform the world through suffering.
My friend Julian is suffering. He is suffering for our sins and our indifference. As Rabbi Heschel reminds us, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” There are two choices. We stand for the truth, for Julian, and free him. We find the courage to be responsible, to pick up the cross. Or we are complicit in the dark night of corporate tyranny that will envelope us all.
Let us pray:
God of grace and God of glory
In thy people pour thy power;
Crown thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour
For the facing of this hour.
Amen
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The NSA’s “Big Delete” Judd Legum


Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.
A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:
Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality
The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”
The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.
The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the “Big Delete” is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA’s internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with “Data Science Development Program interns” to “understand the false-positive use cases” and “help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives.” Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating “unintended downtime” of “mission-related” websites.
While Trump’s executive order claims to target “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” the NSA’s banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people “to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect” — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.
The government memory hole
Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”
An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.
One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”
Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.
On X, Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:
We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.
Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”
Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians’ group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it “deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”
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The Vibe Shift Comes to the Super Bowl. Plus. . . River Page

It’s Monday, February 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Why USAID is the wrong hill for Dems to die on; why Trump is flooding the zone; how American educators are conning kids; and much more.
But first: The Super Bowl.
Boring game, huh? The Eagles beat the Chiefs in a 40–22 blowout that will have pleased my colleague Joe Nocera, but will not be remembered as a classic.
The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.
This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.
Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?
Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)
Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.
And the least subtle rebrand of all? Hardee’s—or, for some reason, Carl’s Jr., if you’re west of the Mississippi—brought back its sexy bikini ads after ditching them eight years ago. The real MAHA? Make America Horny Again.
Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats
On Friday, a judge temporarily blocked Musk and Trump’s plans to put 2,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffers on paid leave, in response to a lawsuit brought by two unions. The judge also reinstated 500 employees who had already been placed on leave. The order will remain in effect until midnight on Valentine’s Day, and the judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday. The unions argued that the government was violating the Constitution and harming workers by taking them out of their jobs.
Unions and judges aren’t the only ones trying to stand in the way of Musk and Trump’s plans for USAID. Congressional Democrats have suddenly become USAID’s greatest defenders, leading a rally in Washington to protect the agency.
The D.C. crowd may have cheered them on but the rest of the country won’t, says Free Press columnist Ruy Teixeira. He points out that most Americans agree that the U.S. spends too much money on foreign aid, and the working class is particularly skeptical of foreign handouts. In their rush to shoot down Musk, have Democrats aimed the gun at their own feet?
Read Ruy’s new column, “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”
Cancel a Subscription, Win a Subscription
This week, one mysterious and presumably wealthy reader is offering free FP subscriptions to readers who prove that they unsubscribed from a legacy media outlet. That’s right. That means free podcasts, free TGIF, and free access to a backlog of God-only-knows-how-many articles. Send proof to tgif@thefp.com, and do it fast: You have to be one of the first 100 entrants to win. What counts as “legacy media”? Use your judgment: The New York Times certainly counts. Paying for articles on CNN.com for some reason? That counts. Cosmo too. The Washington Post? Absolutely. How much more money does Bezos really need? Highlights magazine is an edge case but if you can make the argument, we’re all ears. Happy unsubscribing!
Tyler Cowen: Why Trump Is Flooding the Zone
The first month of the Trump administration has been a whirlwind: dozens of executive actions on everything from DEI to birthright citizenship; short-lived trade wars; massive restructuring of the federal bureaucracy; and so many Truth Social posts. His latest move? Signing a proclamation making February 9 the first Gulf of America Day while aboard Air Force One flying over said Gulf en route to the Super Bowl. It all seems so chaotic—even those of us who are paid to keep up with it all barely can. But is there a method to the madness? Economist, polymath, and podcaster Tyler Cowen says yes.
Read his latest article, “A Unified Theory of Trump’s Hyperactive Start.”
How American Educators Are Conning Kids
The state of America’s public education is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012. American kids in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles are performing worse than they did in the early 1990s, and the “achievement gap” between our highest- and lowest-performing students is now one of the worst in the developed world. In a shocking new report, Free Press journalist Frannie Block writes that instead of solving the problem, educators in a number of states are covering it up.
Read Frannie on “How American Educators are Conning Kids.”
In other Frannie Block education news, her reporting on Qatari influence in American education was cited in Congressional testimony last week.
Can the FAA Be Fixed?
The shocking midair collision above the Potomac last month has prompted many to ask whether America’s air-traffic control system needs reform. The answer, writes John Tierney, is yes—and urgently. He describes an outdated system that still uses paper and pen instead of infrared and high-resolution cameras. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees America’s skies, has delayed modernization for decades. Will this crash provide the impetus for long-overdue reform?
Read John Tierney: “America’s Air-Traffic Control System Is an International Disgrace.”
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A new CBS/YouGov survey found Trump has a positive approval rating across all age groups—with younger voters particularly enthused. The poll found 53 percent of voters approve of the overall job Trump is doing—a higher level of approval than he ever reached during his first term.
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Kanye West has gone nuts again. Since Friday, the mentally ill rapper has posted a series of conspiratorial, bizarre, and antisemitic tweets on X. This includes him saying—not for the first time—“I love Hitler.” Kanye also floated an idea for a swastika T-shirt, said Jewish men are castrated by their wives, posted a string of porn videos on main, and defended fellow musician Sean “Diddy” Combs, who prosecutors say ran a decades-long sex trafficking and blackmail scheme. Amid calls for Elon Musk to ban West from the site, Kanye posted “Heil Elon,” and later reported that Musk had unfollowed him. Kayne speculates that he will soon lose his account—which is probably in everyone’s best interest. No bus stop schizophrenic should have an audience of 33 million on X, even if he made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
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On Friday, Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble. Yesterday, Trump predicted that his administration will find “billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Defense Department. Yeah, probably. But it’s still unclear whether or not cuts will be possible. Elon’s potential role in searching the Pentagon has already raised conflict of interest concerns, given that his companies SpaceX and Starlink have contracts with the government. Plus, there is an open constitutional question about the administration’s ability to stop funds already appropriated by Congress.
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Then, early Saturday morning a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury records and payment systems, and ordered the Trump advisory board to destroy any material they’ve already downloaded. The ruling was the result of a suit brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who say that giving Musk and his team access to Treasury data puts Americans’ private information at risk. Musk says that the judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached.
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Trump ruled out deporting Prince Harry on Friday during an interview with the New York Post, saying “he’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” He went on to say that he believes the prince is “whipped” by his American wife, former actress Meghan Markle. It’s part of a long-running feud: The Duchess of Sussex called him “divisive” and “misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential run, and Trump has since repeatedly criticized the couple over their reported disagreements with the royal family.
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The CDC says nearly 100 people became sick with an unspecified gastrointestinal illness on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. The maritime cesspool left Tampa on February 1 en route to Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, before returning to port Saturday. It’s the sixth disease outbreak the CDC has recorded on a cruise this year. Disease-ridden, numerous, and rat-like as they scurry about from port to port, cruise ships are the vermin of the sea and it’s high time we called an exterminator! Clean them up!
Substacks
February 9, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson
On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.
The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”
After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.
Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.
But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.
Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.
After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”
The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.
Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.
Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.
Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.
According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.
But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.
The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.
Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.
But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.
The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.
The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
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Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/protecting-second-amendment-rights-7b90/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/09/trump-courts-block-early-agenda-00203230
https://www.gao.gov/press-release/gaos-work-yields-70.4-billion-savings-federal-government-fy23
https://oig.ftc.gov/what-you-need-know-about-office-inspector-general
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_c1AfT3R.pdf
Bluesky:
donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lhpxjdo6gk2y
atrupar.com/post/3lhrce37puk2l
joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhr2d6nuck2f
X:
steve_vladeck/status/1888581987532788100
AaronBlake/status/1888582415137780065
emptywheel/status/1888616052004946080
Msdesignerlady/status/1888356802028585190
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