Are most Americans really paying attention?

It’s been another week of unfettered moral depravity in the United States. Donald Trump held a Klan rally thinly disguised as a cabinet meeting during which he denounced Somali immigrants. Pete Hegseth defended cruel and illegal ship strikes that killed at least 83 civilians. Marco Rubio presented a “peace plan” for Ukraine that amounts to giving Vladimir Putin everything he ever wanted. And the saddest thing of all? Most people probably don’t even know any of this happened.
One of the most disturbing stories I saw this disgusting week highlighted a new Pew study showing that news consumption is declining across all political parties and age groups. The report, focused on adults under 30, found that only 15% of people in this age group follow the news “all or most of the time.” When they do, it should come as no surprise to anyone, they consider “news” to be whatever they find on social media.
I can hardly blame them. The news is depressing. Given Trump’s deep-rooted cult, there doesn’t appear to be anything that can be done immediately to stop him. The mainstream media are more interested in appeasing those in power than in holding them to account. And the “opposition party” is irresponsible (we’ll come back to this later). I got sick over Thanksgiving, and during the endless days I spent in bed praying for death, did I watch “the news”? No, I didn’t. I watched movies about space (Apollo 13 is the best film that doesn’t misrepresent any black people ever made), and I got enveloped in Lane Kiffin’s coaching drama. I was not physically or mentally healthy enough to be informed about America for a week.
This country is a horror show and many people don’t like watching horror movies. I can’t blame them for looking the other way. Unfortunately, dirt does not clean itself.
Right now, Hakeem Jeffries is the worst argument for the proposition that Hakeem Jeffries should be Speaker of the House. His performance this week was terrible, bordering on complicity.
First, the man gave Trump credit for “securing the border.” He then praised Trump for pardoning corrupt Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who had been charged with accepting $600,000 in bribes. He concluded by telling the press that they should not expect Democrats to pursue impeachment charges against War Crimes Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The country is crying out for leadership against the violent, racist and corrupt Trump administration. The country desperately needs leaders who can fight Trump on all fronts: political, economic, legal and political. moral. And Jeffries spent a week making the charts For the man. Literal silence would have been better than what Jeffries did this week.
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The problem with Jeffries is that he wants to be the head of the Democratic Party, and that’s a very different job than being the head of the Democratic Party. opposition party. It’s the difference between waiting your turn at the wheel and trying to break the wheel. Jeffries is neither a revolutionary nor a reformer. He’s not an activist or a crusader. He’s just a careerist. He has carefully and skillfully positioned himself to be so close to get a promotion, and he’s trying desperately not to screw it up.
Jeffries exposes the problem of the “leadership” of the entire Democratic Party: their posture in the face of fascism is not that of insurrection or resistance but that of parliamentary games and political coups. They sometimes speak as if they know that Trump and MAGA are totalitarian threats to democratic autonomy, but that is not the case. act I like it. Instead, they act as if Trump is a normal American president and can be defeated by normal political means. Democrats want people to take to the streets to shout “no kings,” but Jeffries wouldn’t dare throw Trump’s tea in the water, and he would support prosecution of anyone who does.
People who throughout history have led anti-authoritarian movements are willing to be imprisoned for this cause. These are people ready to be killed by the very regime they oppose. Hakeem Jeffries is not one of those people. He’s just a moderate guy in the Politburo, trying to distinguish himself from the “hardliners”, hoping he’ll get his chance when the old man leaves the country.
This might work. Jeffries could well get the promotion he covets. I will spend most of the next year arguing that Democrats must take back the House and, therefore, Jeffries must be the next Speaker of the House in order to put some restraint on the fascist president. But Democrats like Jeffries will never do it defeat Trump, because Democrats like Jeffries are unwilling to question the system that produced him. They are just waiting for their turn to run this system.
What I wrote
Pete Hegseth is a murderer. I’ve written about all the laws that make this so. He should be impeached regardless of what Hakeem Jeffries thinks.
In news unrelated to the current chaos
So Lane Kiffin was the head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels (a name I can’t believe they’re allowed to keep). He left the school last week to become head coach of the LSU Tigers, a rival of Ole Miss, despite the fact that Ole Miss is expected to make the College Football Playoff while LSU will not. This understandably angered Ole Miss fans, and many in the college football community are calling out Kiffin’s betrayal of the university, even though, in simple football terms, the LSU position is clearly the better one.
Kiffin got a seven-year, $91 million contract from LSU, a public university, which works out to about $13 million a year, making him the second-highest paid coach in the country. With this, he immediately became the highest-paid public official in the state of Louisiana (although it is not uncommon for a public university football coach to be the highest-paid public official in a state).
It’s interesting that this is happening in Louisiana, because the only reason the LSU job was open is because the school recently fired its last high-paid coach, Brian Kelly. The state of Louisiana still owes him $54 million.
After Kelly’s firing, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry threw a tantrum. He vowed that LSU’s athletic director would not be allowed to offer such an expensive contract again and that future contracts would not be guaranteed so as not to make Louisiana taxpayers pay for a football coach they already fired. Landry is a Republican – and while you know I don’t like to say nice things about Republicans, Landry was absolutely right about that. The salaries of college football coaches (and basketball coaches) are completely out of step with those of the public universities they work for. It would be one thing if all the billions of dollars generated by college sports went back to the United States, but that’s not the case. LSU does not fund levees in New Orleans.
With the hiring of Kiffin, it would appear that Landry’s directive was completely ignored by LSU. Not only did he hire a coach for $91 million; this gave him a fully guaranteed contract, and that contract was negotiated by the same agent who represented the former coach.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned that even he himself was relatively powerless against the military-industrial complex. I guess Jeff Landry could now talk about the football-industrial complex. It seems there is no way even a state governor can stop the madness when the football team needs a new celebrity head coach.
I’ve said it many times: A presidential candidate who set out to eliminate corruption and bribery in college sports, allowing fair competition while distributing the money generated by sports more equitably, would win in a landslide. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for a presidential candidate who fights to eliminate corruption and bribery from the White House.
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