reflectivepundit

Strongman al-Assad is Gone. What Now?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

During the last decade, the al-Qaeda related al-Nusra Front was in Syria a minor player in comparison to what was for several years the far larger ISIS organization. Like anyone else following the news, I was surprised by the rapid fall of Syria’s strongman Bashar al-Assad last weekend. I was far more surprised by the leading role that al-Nusra’s successor group Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) played in the rebellion against Assad.

What now? HTS is among those entities that are designated terrorist organizations in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and other Western countries. HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is among Washington’s most wanted terrorists with a $10 Mill. reward for information that would lead his arrest.

HTS and al-Jolani seem in control of Damascus, other big cities, and a big chunk of Syrian real estate. According to their Telegram channel and in public declarations they try to keep enough of the institutions of government working so that the country does not suffer the same fate as others after the fall of their authoritarian rulers. Just think what happened in Iraq and in Libya after the fall of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi—endless civil wars between a multitude of factions.

For several years now, al-Jolani has denounced al-Qaeda’s global terrorist agenda and instead embraced the liberation of Syria from the strongman Assad rule as his and his group’s only objective. Today, in Damascus, he dropped his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and reclaimed his real name Ahmed al-Shara—I suppose to signal his change from terrorist to a now celebrated freedom fighter.

Whether one believes that this man has changed or not, he is now perhaps the most important player in efforts to prevent another horrific consequence in the wake of another strongman’s fall from power. To that end, I understand why London, Paris, and Washington are considering the removal of HTS from their lists of terrorist organizations which would facilitate diplomatic contacts with the new power holder in Damascus.

Initially, at least, there are signs of a swift cooperation between the victorious rebels and high officials of the al-Assad government. The first goal is to establish and maintain order and security. The HTS leader has asked bureaucrats and police to return to work.

Making progress domestically will depend also on the role of former government officials and all kinds of professionals who are now returning from abroad ready to join in the rebuilding of a stable state and one in which the rights of ethnic and religious minorities are assured.

It will be difficult for Ahmed al-Shara to keep the various groups involved in the rebellion united.

What neighboring countries and the international community of nations can and will do and what the fall of strongman Assad means for the new geopolitical realities in the Middle East and the rest of the world, poses another set of questions without definitive answers.

After Biden Pardoned his Son Critics Go Bananas

By Brigitte L. Nacos

President Joe Biden said repeatedly that he would not pardon his son Hunter. At a time, when America’s democracy was under sustained attack by the incoming president and the far-right cast he has selected for key positions in his administration, Biden’s promise spoke to his respect for democratic institutions, including the system of justice.  

Biden changed his mind. Last weekend, he granted his son a total pardon for a more than 10-year period. That same weekend, president-elect Trump nominated his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France. In 2020, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, a convicted felon; at the same time, a bunch of criminally convicted Trump associates were pardoned as well. More recently, Trump promised repeatedly that he would pardon the “political prisoners” convicted for violent crimes during the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol “on day one” of his second term as president.

Although Trump used his constitutional pardon power excessively, critics claim that Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter makes it more likely that Trump will expand this veto power even further in his second term. Nonsense. Trump does not need a precedent. He makes his extreme rules as he goes along.  

While there was no outcry against Trump’s nomination of a family member with a criminal record for a top ambassadorship, Trump himself, many Republicans and Democrats, plus plenty of media commentators went bananas after the news broke that Biden pardoned his son.

“Biden was dishonest,” “Biden lied,” were common headlines and comments in the news. The chorus of critics grew and became louder every day. Where was and is the same outrage, the same anger, when Donald Trump lies day-in and day-out? Whereas being dishonest is mostly ignored when it applies to Trump, Biden is held to a higher standard for this one lie even by those who accept and embrace their Dear Leader’s perennial aversion to truth.

According to Biden’s critics, the president’s claim that Hunter was prosecuted because he was his son, is in tune with Trump’s hostility against the justice system that the former president considers part of “the deep state.” But unlike Trump during his presidency, President Biden did not interfere with judicial decisions—and not with the prosecutions of his son who was found guilty of tax evasion and falsely filling out an application form for his gun permit during a time, when he was an alcohol- and drug addict.  

A good guess is that the real reason for Biden’s turnaround on pardoning Hunter was the nomination of Kash Patel for the position of FBI director. Patel, like his idol Trump, has been tireless in pledging retribution for the alleged but not real persecution of President Trump by the FBI and the Department of Justice. The Bidens are on top of the MAGA reprisal list followed by many other leading Democrats, “disloyal” former members of the Trump administration, and critical media personalities.

What parents would not use their legal power to protect their son from a future power holder who has threatened a “bloodbath,” when talking about the existential fight against the “enemy within” and the public execution of his most evil enemies?

Donald Trump’s Rush to Strongman Rule

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Donald Trump’s nominations of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of Intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for Attorney General drove the reality home that the former and future U.S. president follows his fascist campaign rhetoric and the equally undemocratic “Project 25” playbook as he selects the supporting cast for his second presidency.

Trump did not hide his sinister plans during his campaign. On the contrary. He repeated, again and again, that he and his MAGA crowd were in an existential battle against the demonic “enemy within” which he attacked as more dangerous than foreign enemies. Thus, the alleged “deep state” of “liberals, socialists, and communists” had to be destroyed to make way for the MAGA revolution.

Trump added to his many lies, when he claimed no knowledge of “Project 25” during the campaign. Now, he and his transition team and some authors of the detailed blueprint for the deconstruction of the administrative state are hard at work to implement the prescription for building a government in which the Dear Leader has total power.

I know that the term “fascist” is over- and misused. Trump, like other fascists before him, called his alleged enemies frequently fascists in the latter part of the campaign. Now, we see unmistakable signs of a coming fascist state here in the United States of America.

The main characteristic of fascism is that all powers are in the hands of the leader. In this case only people totally loyal to Donald Trump, not to the U.S. Constitution, have been and will be appointed to and nominated for the highest positions in the administration.

Gaetz, Gabbard, und Hegseth pass this loyalty test with flying colors. The normal qualifications for such positions, namely, expertise, integrity, and independence are completely irrelevant in a fascist regime and thus, now, for Trump and the enablers around him.

Therefore, it does not matter whether the GOP Senators reject one or more of Trump’s nominees. Whoever is not confirmed, will be replaced by another Trump loyalist, who will be equally eager follow Trump’s wishes.     

Fascist leaders leave the legislative and judicial branches in place but do away with the check-and-balance system in which the branches share power. Trump has a compliant Supreme Court in place. The other day, he signaled that he also wants an impotent congress. He demanded that the GOP majority leader in the U.S. Senate must order a recess of the upper chamber which would eliminate the confirmation process altogether in a violation of the “consent and advice” role of the Senate.  

Fascist leaders do not accept term limits. They want to be leaders for life. Yesterday, Trump told GOP members in the House of Representatives, “I suspect I won’t be running again—unless you do something. Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” Contrary to some reports, this was no joke. Rather, Trump launched a trial balloon that he will eventually follow up with a push to getting rid of the two-term limit.

Less than two weeks after Trump’s election victory and more than two months before his inauguration, the strongman is rapidly consolidating his power.

Once he gets back into the White House, he will be ready and able to implement his extremist policies.   

The Paradox of Donald Trump’s Victory Makers

By Brigitte L. Nacos

A few days after Donald Trump moved into the White House in January 2017, he signed an executive order that prohibited citizens of Muslim majority countries to enter the United States. He frequently called Muslims and Arabs at home and abroad terrorists. Yet, before Election Day, two Muslim and Arab leaders in Michigan endorsed Trump. One of them called the GOP candidate “a man of peace.” In Dearborn, where 55 percent of residents are of Middle Eastern descent, and in neighboring Dearborn Heights, where more of a third of citizens are Muslims and/or Arabs, Trump beat Kamala Harris handily. Most of these Trump voters are upset about President Biden’s support of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon. But if they believe that Trump will be more helpful to Palestinians and the Lebanese population, they are mistaken. Netanyahu celebrated Trump’s “historic victory” knowing that his strongman colleague will not interfere with his controversial policies.

Exit polls revealed on Election Day that 54 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of Donald Trump and 55% considered his views “too extreme.” Yet, Trump won the national popular vote along with the winning Electoral College votes. In other words, although a majority of voters had very negative views of Trump, enough of them voted for him.

Given Trump’s starring role in the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the horrific consequences of draconian anti-abortion laws in a bunch of states, it was no surprise, when opinion polls suggested that a sizeable majority of well educated, white suburban women, especially Independents, would vote for Harris this time around. It did not happen. Harris won merely 54 percent of the women’s vote nation-wide. It was not enough. In Montana and Missouri abortion rights amendments passed with strong female support. But ironically, many of the same female voters ignored the threat of a national ban of abortions under the coming Trump presidency, when they cast their votes for the GOP candidate.

Since he entered the political arena in 2015, Donald Trump has called Latinos criminals, rapists, animals, and carriers of diseases and bad genes. Yet, 54 percent of Latino men voted for the former president compared to 44 percent for Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden received 59 percent and Donald Trump 36 percent of the male Latino vote. In some states, namely Pennsylvania and Michigan, the Latino share of the vote might have contributed to Trump’s victory.

In sharp contrast to many other countries, America is still not ready to elect a woman president. This time, voters picked the same narcissist for the second time, while rejecting his highly qualified female competitor.

Trump and Vance: Sexist Autocrats at the Gate of Power

By Brigitte L. Nacos

One reason why the name “strongmen” befits autocrats is that they typically have a male superiority complex. In the fascist mind, men are the superior and women the inferior gender.  

Italy’s Benito Mussolini claimed that women “never created anything.” 

Germany’s Adolf Hitler wrote in his manifesto Mein Kampf,

“The rights of citizenship shall be conferred on every young man whose health and character have been certified as good, after having completed his period of military service. The German girl is a subject of the State but will become a citizen when she marries.”

A century later, after women in western democracies won voting and other rights, anti-democratic far-right autocrats threaten the progress that women fought for in the past.

Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance are poster boys of sexist would-be strongmen in the current campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris is their main target.

At a recent campaign stop, Trump told the crowd that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.” What a display of sexism. For Trump, old age affected the male opponent’s mental abilities, the female opponent was never mentally fit but born, as Trump claimed at another occasion, with “a low IQ.”

The former president’s vulgar denigration of the vice president is both sexist and racist. When he called her the other day “lazy as hell,” he invoked an old stereotype of blacks. In 2016, Trump’s rhetorical attacks against Hillary Clinton were sharp, but nothing came close to his vicious language against Harris. “You are a shit vice president,” he shouted at one rally. And the crowd screamed back in an enthusiastic chorus, “shit, shit, shit.”

JD Vance seconds everything his “Dear Leader” spills out. And then he dishes out his own extreme ideas and plans. Like Hitler and other past and present strongmen nationalists, Vance’s reactionary notion of females’ role in life is their duty to bear children and keep house. Vance wants “childless cat ladies” and married couples without off-springs to pay higher taxes and have diminished voting rights. The latter punishment for not having “a direct stake” in their country would be achieved by giving children voting rights to be executed by their parents.

Just as telling is Vance’s agreement with the statement of one like-minded fellow that the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female is helping to raise children--supposedly he meant grandchildren.

Obviously, Vance has learned from his mentor Peter Thiel, a wealth, anti-democratic high-tech guy who wrote in an essay that “the extension of the franchise to women was one of the major reasons for the decay of America’s democracy.”

Thiel and his authoritarian Silicon Valley brethren, who are contributing generously to the Trump-Vance campaign, would get their say in a Trump/Vance administration.

With sexist autocrats at the gate of power, women must stop them, when they cast their votes.  

How Trump’s Gene Theory Copycats Hitler’s Aryan Superiority Tale

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Earlier this month, in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s immigration record by claiming that illegal aliens commit crimes because they have bad genes. He said, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes.”

A year earlier, Trump accused illegal immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”  He also called illegals “animals” and “not-human.”

And in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican Party’s Nominating Convention, he warned contrary to the facts,

• The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth…They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums…That’s why, to keep our family safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.

In short, Trump claims that illegal immigrants, who are mostly brown and black, have bad genes and thereby poison the purity of white Americans who have good genes. For him, that is a  reason to remove them from American soil.

That should give all non-white citizens pause, when they fill out their ballot less than four weeks from now. We know from his many racist remarks and actions in the past that Trump applies his unscientific gene theory to non-white citizens as well.

Trump’s dangerous claims are very similar to Adolf Hitler’s race theory. In his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler attacked German Jews as plague that endangered the Aryan superiority which he believed was based on good genes and blood. In his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote nearly a century ago,  

• History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law [of nature]. It shows, with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture.

And in a speech in Munich, Hitler said,

• WE DEMAND IMMEDIATE EXPULSION OF ALL JEWS WHO HAVE ENTERED GERMANY SINCE 1914, and of all those, too, who through trickery on the Stock Exchange or through other shady transactions have gained their wealth.Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence we must hold aloft a flaming ideal [of the superiority of Aryan genes].

Many influential people in Germany, political and business leaders, did not believe that Hitler planned to make his race theory part and parcel of his domestic policy, once he would become Germany’s leader. But many Germans bought his scapegoating of their Jewish fellow-citizens blaming them for all the problems the country had at the time.

Today, Trump’s stereotyping of illegal immigrant is enthusiastically supported by MAGA crowds and many GOP politicians. Opponents are silent because they do not have the backbone to speak the truth.

Trump has promised the biggest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history and the establishment of detention camps to facility this task once he is president again.

We should remember that Hitler threatened “only” the expulsion of Jews from their German homeland before he came to power.

And we all know what he did as strongman leader.

 

To Unmask the Trump-Vance Threat, Harris and Walz Must Call a Spade a Spade

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After he learned that Kamala Harris had chosen Tim Walz as running mate, Donald Trump claimed in a post on his social media platform Truth Social (what an ironic name!), “This is the most Radical Left duo in American history…” This was a mild version of his usual accusations that characterize his domestic political “enemies” as existential threat to America. On Veterans Day last November, for example, Trump said,

“The real threat is from the radical left. And it’s growing every day, every single day… They lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible…They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream…We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

He and his acolytes have revealed what they mean with rooting out the enemy within, namely, to destroy the “deep state” and the “administrative state” and replace them with MAGA loyalist who are being trained for their “patriotic” duty in the next Trump administration. Oh, yes, after the mainstream media finally covered the scary content of “Project 2025” at some length, Trump distanced himself from the far-right blue print. But the same Trump supporters who worked on that project are involved in a more detailed plan for the transition from the Biden to another Trump presidency.

And nobody should forget that the former president has threatened retribution against non-loyalists, that he has talked about prosecuting and executing high level members in his administration and in the congress who stood up to his illegal schemes.

Trump’s illegal and immoral actions and plans are so numerous that they seem normal and not worth mentioning.

The normalization of Trump’s extremism and its blessing by his running mate are great, perhaps the greatest problems for his opponents in this campaign. In their efforts to counter the dark picture of contemporary America that Trump and his side-kick JD Vance are painting, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are embracing hope and joy and laughter. That is a wonderful antidote to the script of the MAGA leaders that speaks to the fear and resentment that they stoke in their supporters.    

But the lion’s share of the Harris/Walz campaign energy must be reserved to unmask the existential threat that Trump and Vance post for America. That is not a laughing matter. Satire, jokes, and hints will not do.

Harris and Walz must call a spade a spade and bare the undemocratic views and plans of former president Trump and U.S. Senator Vance as un-American. They must explain the devastating consequences of the MAGA agenda and its implementation for the mass of Americans. And they must deny the far-right’s birthright to patriotism and the American flag.

When Vice President Harris spoke in Philadelphia about the “promise of America” coming true for her and her team-mate Walz and used the refrain “Only in America,” the crowd screamed repeatedly, U.S.A!

That was a good beginning for their 90-day campaign.

Columbia University Must Not Hand the GOP Woke Police President Shafik’s Scalp

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After teaching for more than three decades at Columbia University, I have followed the protests on and around the campus from afar. To say that I am troubled by the deep divisions among students, faculty, and administration is an understatement. Lately, I have been asked by several people about my take on the Morningside Heights situation. I do not have a quick and simple answer. In confrontations like those at Columbia and many universities today, the conclusion what side or sides are right or wrong cannot easily be made. Especially not, when media reality does not fully reflect factual reality on the ground.

On one point, however, I do have a categorical position: Columbia’s faculty, students, and ultimately the board must ignore all calls for the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, to resign. If she is forced out, it will be a total victory for Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who first trapped the presidents of Harvard University, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania during a congressional hearing with hostile questions, none of the witnesses seemed prepared for. It cost two of them their jobs.

After Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, was forced to resign, Stefanik posted on social media, “One down. Two to go.” That was her goal from the outset. Behead the leader of ivy league universities, the long-time targets of the far-right. Shortly thereafter, Harvard’s Claudine Gay resigned. MIT president Sally Kornbluth has so far survived the Stefanik-led far-right attack.

Recently, Dr. Shafik and two members of Columbia University’s board appeared before the same committee and seemingly tried to appease Stefanik and other woke hunters. That did not please part of the Columbia faculty and student body. And it certainly did not appease Stefanik. The onetime moderate Republican from up-state New York, who became a MAGA militant on a fast track to power in Washington, wants to add Dr. Shafik’s scalp to her trophy collection.

On Monday, Elise Stefanik, and the other members of New York’s GOP delegation in the House, sent Dr. Shafik a letter urging her “to step down immediately so that someone who will take action against this mob can step up...”

Today, House Speaker Mike Johnson, perhaps fearful to be outflanked by Stefanik, called for Dr. Shafik’s ouster as well before he visited the Columbia campus to speak with Jewish students.

So far, the Columbia senate, in which faculty, students, and board members are represented, consideres censoring president Shafik, especially, for calling in the police to arrest protesters who refused to leave their camp site amidst the Morningside campus. There seem no calls, up to now, for her resignation from within the Columbia community.

A major point of those who oppose the forceful removal of protesters is that these students were not violent. What they and most people mean, when they think of or say violence, is causing physical harm. But just as serious, or even greater mental and even physical harm can be caused by hate speech, vocal attacks, and visuals (such as burning crosses, displaying swastikas, or waving Hamas flags).

I will write more about my thoughts on the current campus protests in future posts.

Trump Accomplice is Now a Political Analyst for NBC/MSNBC: A New Low for Legacy Press

By Brigitte L. Nacos

A free press is supposed to be a check on the institutions and officials of government by scrutinizing everyone involved in the political power play and informing citizens and voters fully. That’s why the press in democracies is understood as extra check on government in case the institutional system of checks-and-balances does not work. Moreover, a free press should reflect the whole range of political views among governing elites and governed constituents.

To discharge these responsibilities, political opinions voiced in the responsible press should not be one-sided but rather an amalgam of different viewpoints. In the American setting, this should mean that news consumers are presented with the ideological and policy positions of the two major parties and relevant additional views. When the views of political leaders and their followers threaten the democratic fabric of body politic, the press’s commentators must warn and alarm.  

Like in the past, mainstream news organizations, such as TV and radio networks and the large print/online presses, have today political commentators across the partisan spectrum.

Why, then, is the hiring of Ronna McDaniel as a paid political analyst for NBC/MSNBC News disconcerting and an insult to journalistic ethics?

McDaniel served from 2017 to recently as chair of the Republican National Committee. During Trump’s presidency and thereafter, she was a loyal supporter of the Trump. She became his accomplice, when he tried to overturn the 2020 election results by convincing fake state electors to nullify Biden’s victory. She backed Trumps and the MAGA/GOPs Big Lie, claimed consistently that the 2020 election was rigged, and refused to criticize the storming of the US Capitol that her boss incited.

In other words, as influential chair of the RNC McDaniel was for six years a pathological liar in support of the whims of one illiberal leader—not of the conservative roots of the Republican Party. She seconded her boss’s relentless attacks on journalists and thereby contributed to the hostility of MAGA crowds toward reporters at mass rallies.

In her appearance on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” McDaniel tried to distance herself from her past lies in the service of Trump. She seemed to accept that Biden won the 2020 election and claimed to oppose Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he returns to the White House. But even as she reversed former statements during her NBC appearance, she claimed that she had not changed her positions.

She tried hard to protect her contract with NBC.

In doing so, she had the gall to tell other members of the “Meet the Press” panel, “I think you should trust me!” But many NBC journalists, along with colleagues across the media landscape, remained critical of her hiring. Thankfully, so.

A chronic liar cannot be trusted. Not by serious journalists and not by serious news consumers.

Trump warns of “a bloodbath” in case he does not win this year’s election. And the news media yawns

By Brigitte L. Nacos

On Saturday (3/16), Donald Trump warned during a campaign stop in Ohio that there will be “a bloodbath” if he is not elected later this year. When I checked the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a bunch of well-regarded regional newspapers this morning, none of them carried the shocking warning on page one. The websites of Times and News, too, did not treat the former and perhaps next president’s outrageous threat as number one breaking news.

Instead, they paid more attention to the presidential candidates’ campaign donations, Trump supporters’ successful spread of disinformation, the election in Russia, arms smuggling to Yemen, and the Schumer-Netanyahu feud.

The Times headline “Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He loses,” rated Trump’s old insult of “illegals”—he called them repeatedly “animals,” “rapist,” “criminals” and the likes—higher than his unprecedented “bloodbath” threat. And the story itself cited Trump’s new rhetorical low only in the third paragraph. Note, that the story was updated on Sunday morning.

Everybody should read and remember this explicit Trump warning issued this weekend: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”

The Washington Post headlined its report, "Trump says some undocumented immigrants are 'not people' and relegated the bloodbath warning to the subtitle. It is only in the sixth paragraph that the reporters get to Trump's most outrageous remark and cited it: "Later in the rally, Trump warned it will be a bloodbath for the country, if he is not elected. The comment came as he was promising to hike tariffs on foreign-made cars, and it was not clear exactly what Trump was referring to with his admonition." 

What could not be clear, when a presidential candidate predicts a bloodbath for the country, if he is not elected? And why would the news report call Trump’s warning of something horrific to happen to America an admonition? It sounded more like a threat of civil war or a terrorism threat that goes and in hand with his frequent warning that this election year will be “the last battle.”

When I grew up in Germany and was an aspiring young journalist, I looked at American journalists and the high standards in their professional ethics rules with tremendous admiration. And I was not an exception. Many of my colleagues felt the same at the time, when German journalism found a new beginning after the dark years of the Nazi regime and looked to the Anglo-American press model.

Yes, technology has changed the whole media industry. But if the news organizations that are perceived to be the best in the country and the world cannot or do not want to recognize and priorities truly extraordinary news, the old press model that I once admired greatly is on its way out.