For the Democratic Party smear artists falsely claiming that — either explicitly or implicitly — I’ve supported Trump in any manner:
As Donald Trump’s campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. . . . Imagine calling yourself a journalist, and then — as you watch an authoritarian politician get closer to power by threatening and unleashing violence and stoking the ugliest impulses — denouncing not that politician, but rather other journalists who warn of the dangers. That is the embodiment of the ethos of corporate journalism in America, and a potent illustration of why its fetishized reverence for “objectivity” is so rotted and even dangerous. . . .
As a result, nobody should be looking to our nation’s largest media outlets to serve as a bulwark against Trumpism or any other serious menace. The rules they have imposed on themselves, by design, ensure their own neutrality even in the face of the most extreme evils.
Democracy Now interview, August 29, 2016:
Democracy Now, August 29, 2016:
My August, 2015 Intercept article defending Jorge Ramos for interrupting Trump’s press conference:
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, “Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that’s to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump’s advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing. . . .
What is more noble for a journalist to do: confront a dangerous, powerful billionaire-demagogue spouting hatemongering nonsense about mass deportation, or sit by quietly and pretend to have no opinions on any of it and that “both sides” are equally deserving of respect and have equal claims to validity? As Ramos put it simply, in what should not even need to be said: “I’m a reporter. My job is to ask questions. What’s ‘totally out of line’ is to eject a reporter from a press conference for asking questions.”
What Ramos did here was pure journalism in its classic and most noble expression: He aggressively confronted a politician wielding a significant amount of power over some pretty horrible things that the politician is doing and saying.
VARIOUS TWEETS SINCE HIS NOMINATION:
VARIOUS TRUMP SUPPORTERS WEIGH IN:
The alt-right/Neo-Nazi’s Daily Stormer, September 23, 2016:
And immediately in response to this post:
As a Jewish LGBT journalist in an inter-racial, same-sex marriage, the claim that I’m aligned with the alt-right or will thrive in a Trump presidency is not just self-evidently offensive but every bit as dishonest as the claim that I’ve been pro-Trump during the campaign. But, needless to say, no evidence in the world can deter Democratic Party apparatchiks from pursuing their smear campaigns against critics.
