Paul Rosenberg, Salon

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, there was a lot of attention focused on the role of "fake news," but a year later, a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review told a very different story, with the blunt title, "Don't blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media." Instead of fake news — which was a real but relatively small problem in 2016 (all fake Russian ads amounted to 0.1 percent of Facebook's daily advertising revenue) — it centered on an analysis of the New York Times' agenda-setting campaign coverage: America's paper of record ran as many front-page stories about Hillary Clinton's emails (10) in the last six days before the election as it did about all policy details combined in the two months before the election.

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"If Clinton had a hard time getting her message out, she certainly didn't get much help from the newspaper of record," I wrote here at the time. "Even though Trump got slightly more front-page scandal coverage than Clinton did, he faced nothing remotely like the six-day avalanche she endured." ...

As was widely predicted, there's been a great deal of chaos since Elon Musk purchased Twitter: Advertisers fleeing, mass firings, hate speech spiking, a plague of fake accounts, even talk of bankruptcy. At this point it's easy to forget the early warning signal when Musk tweeted a link to a baseless anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack from a known misinformation website that had once pushed a story that Hillary Clinton died on 9/11. But it was precisely the sort of telling, seemingly minor and idiosyncratic act that poets and playwrights since time immemorial have locked onto as character portents of destiny.

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That came just a few news cycles after Musk assured advertisers that "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences," promising that "our platform must be warm and welcoming to all." Musk deleted the Pelosi link after it had already gotten more than 24,000 retweets and 86,000 likes — in other words, after the damage had already been done. Needless to say, there were no consequences for Musk, at least not right away. ...

The Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the American electorate. But as shocking as the destruction of a fundamental right may be, more radical changes may lie ahead, as Andrew Seidel warns in his new book, "American Crusade: How the Supreme Court Is Weaponizing Religious Freedom." As I have argued repeatedly over the past several years, the religious right has mounted a sustained struggle to pervert the meaning of religious freedom, transforming it from a shield to protect the rights of all to worship freely into a sword wielded by the most powerful.

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There are many facets to this struggle, but there's no doubt that the most consequential field of battle is the Supreme Court. Seidel's book does a masterful job of laying bare the full scope of that struggle and the stakes involved — which could ultimately mean a de facto end to the rule of law as we normally understand it. As Seidel notes, 150 years ago the Supreme Court warned that weaponized religious freedom would "permit every citizen to become a law unto himself," so there's much more at stake here than "just" the First Amendment. ...

A string of recent election results — including the Kansas abortion amendment and special elections for House seats in New York and Alaska — make it clear that the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade has enormous political consequences, and could even end up preserving the Democrats' hold on Congress this year. But the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization wasn't the only earth-shaking break with precedent in the last two weeks of its term. Even if Democrats do hold onto Congress and somehow codify Roe into law (an unlikely set of outcomes) that would only affect one aspect of the vast sweep of policy change the court's rulings portend.

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The new book by UC Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, "Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism," shows how fundamental those changes could be and focuses on the bogus legal reasoning known as "originalism," which plays such a crucial role in justifying this sudden and sweeping assertion of judicial power. ...

If you want to understand Donald Trump as a political actor, Jennifer Mercieca's book "Demagogue for President" (Salon interview here) remains the clearest, most illuminating explanation. But if you want to understand the larger story in which Trump plays a part — however large he may still loom at the moment — then Francesca Bolla Tripodi's new book "The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy" offers a stark and clarifying picture of how Trump's political stage was constructed in the first place, and how that project may continue into the indefinite future, with or without Trump.

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Tripodi's subtitle calls attention to the central role of algorithmic manipulations in today's media environment, but her account is informed by history as well as her own ethnographic observations, so recent high-tech manipulations are situated in a much deeper and broader context. In 2017, Tripodi writes, she set out "to understand how conservative voters sought out information they felt they could trust. ... My goal was to better understand how Trump voters made sense of the contemporary news environment and how search engine optimization might play a role." ...