Opinion

Donald Trump, the former president who is testing his political capital by endorsing large numbers of GOP candidates to bolster his own personal brand, is expected to endorse J.D. Vance, a far right Christian conservative who last year was accused of antisemitism. Vance, a venture capitalist, is running to replace retiring Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman.

Why?

My phone vibrated, indicating a new text message.

I checked and found one from a Turkish colleague who occasionally visited the White House during the Trump presidency: "I'm a 26-year-old journalist. I don't want to end up in jail."

On tax day this year, wouldn’t you like to be Sen. Ron Johnson?

Wisconsin’s senior U.S. senator paid only $2,015 in state income tax in 2017, despite earning more than $450,000 that year. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice, who first reported on Johnson’s teeny-weeny tax bill, pointed out that the multimillonaire’s 2017 Wisconsin tax payment was two dollars less than what a married couple filing jointly paid on a taxable income of $40,000.

As most New York City residents could tell you, despite what conservative suburbanites would like to believe, riding the subway is much safer than driving. That's why Tuesday's mass shooting, in which 10 people were injured by gunfire, was so shocking. The crime, as terrible as it is, is the epitome of the word "anomaly." Indeed, it's nearly a miracle how rare mass shootings on subways are in a country awash with guns. As of this morning, there have been 131 mass shootings this year alone. They happen in schools, workplaces, homes, nightclubs, and on public streets, but with surprising infrequency on public transportation. As a New York Times headline tacitly admitted, a mass shooting on the subway is something "the city had long avoided."

Unfortunately, that a headline admits such events are rare is itself an anomaly. By and large, the mainstream media — especially the New York Times — fell right into the trap of using this shooting to feed a misleading right-wing narrative that paints cities as dangerous hellholes. Heaven help every urban-dwelling child of a Fox News addict who had to endure pressure to live out their parent's Hallmark movie fantasy. In truth, this crime says very little about cities being uniquely dangerous. Instead, it's a story about how America's failure to enact sensible gun control leads inevitably to senseless gun violence. But, to read the mainstream media coverage, one would think that this one bizarre crime was somehow indicative of a general trend of cities going to pot.

I’ve come to believe no one knows exactly why candidates win or lose elections for public office. We say we do. We don’t, though.

We would know why Candidate X defeated Candidate Y if we had direct knowledge of every single cause and effect accreting toward one irrefutable end. We can’t know, though. Our brains are limited.

It's becoming more obvious every day that they didn't teach "On War" by Carl von Clausewitz at the 401st KGB school in Leningrad when Vladimir Putin was a student in 1975. Right from the start of the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Putin violated Clausewitz's most famous axiom, that a true strategist should "identify the decisive point and concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives."

Putin's invasion was all over the map. He had forces in Belarus, north of Kyiv; in Russia, north of Kharkiv; in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donbas held by separatists; and in Crimea, which he had taken in 2014. He attacked on all four axes at once. The force in Belarus, ostensibly located there for a training exercise, was to be what they call in the army "the tip of the spear" for the attack on Kyiv, some 100 miles from the Belarus border. This military grouping quickly turned into the infamous 40-mile convoy, which was heavily hit by dismounted Ukrainian troops who decimated supply trucks, tanks, armored personnel carriers and fuel trucks with shoulder-fired weapons.

The American news media has collectively decided to ignore Donald Trump's threats of white supremacist violence and sedition. If you believe this will keep you safe from his schemes and machinations, or from what his legions of followers may do, you are greatly mistaken.

Apparently, the gatekeepers of the approved public discourse have convinced themselves that they are somehow serving the public interest by ignoring these escalating threats. In reality, these gatekeepers are doing exactly the opposite: They are normalizing American fascism by minimizing its dangers. In a moment when the news media as an institution should sound the alarm even more loudly about the threat to American democracy, safety and security represented by Trumpism and neofascism a choice has been made to mock or whitewash the imminent danger.

Some might say The New York Times is the king of normalizing views from the right, even views that could be considered disturbing or, in some cases, even dangerous to their fellow citizens, the nation, or the world. The Times’ pre-World War II profiles of a young Adolf Hitler are a legendary example.

In 2015 The Times republished what it calls “1922: Hitler in Bavaria,” patting itself on the back for getting “a lot of things right,” like its “description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup.”

This month, the House passed The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (MORE), a bill eliminating federal criminal penalties for the manufacture, distribution and possession of marijuana.

The bill is a model for criminal justice reform, which in many ways borrows productively from the ideas and framework of the “defund the police” movement.

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.