Three terrible stories – two of them under the cover of the Epstein story and one of them part of that story…
1. The Columbia University capitulation: a creepy contract between the Trump fascist regime and the cringing Ivy League institution. To preserve access to billions of dollars in federal money, the once proud but now cowed school agreed Wednesday to:
- pay the federal government more than $220 million over three years.
- pay $21 million to settle supposed “civil rights violations” against Jewish employees and students who felt uncomfortable because Columbia students righteously rose up against Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on the people of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 2023 terror attack on Israeli settlements.
- end all programs meant to increase racial equity and inclusion at the university.
- pervert its curriculum and faculty hiring in accord with support for the US-Israel Zionist genocide project and with the insidiously false equation of anti-Zionist and anti-genocide perspectives with “anti-Semitism.”
- deepen its capacity and readiness for the repression of student and employee protests.
- report yet more directly to the fascist Trump regime on its international students.
This p a t h e t i c “milestone settlement” with Columbia was widely and correctly reported as a major win for the fascist leader Trump’s campaign to bend so-called higher education to his authoritarian will. The Republi-Nazi White House called it a “road map” for future forced “settlements” with other colleges and universities it has falsely accused of abiding “antisemitism” because they did not repress pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests quickly or savagely enough for the orange-sprayed Dear Leader’s taste.
Columbia’s president Claire Shipman, a longtime television reporter, absurdly claimed that the university’s wretched surrender to the Trump regime protects the school’s independence and values. You betchya!
Special shout-out here to all the high school seniors who turned down offers from fascism-collaborating Columbia last spring!
2. Fascist leader Trump’s Federal Communications Commission yesterday gave its authorization to an $8 billion merger between the corporate media giants Paramount Global and Skydance. This approval comes in the wake of three actions taken by Paramount against its affiliated broadcast network CBS:
- Forcing the resignation of Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of CBS’s venerable news program 60 Minutes — a show disliked by Mein Trumpf.
- Paying $16 million to Trump the “private citizen” to settle an absurd lawsuit in which the deranged and lethal fascist lunatic made the brazenly absurd claim that 60 Minutes had engaged in “election interference” by editing a Kamala Harris quote in 2024.
- Cancelling the highly popular and profitable Late Show with Steven Colbert, a biting liberal Trump critic, three days after Colbert rightly called the settlement “a big fat bribe” to help secure FCC approval.
The New York Times reported today that the merger “ushers in the beginning of a new family dynasty for Paramount, which has been controlled by the Redstone family for decades. David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, plans to take control of the company when the deal closes.”
David Ellison, a former tv actor, is the current CEO of Skydance. The Times might have mentioned that Larry Ellison has been one of Trump’s top financial backers.
The FCC’s approval was finalized after Trump’s fascist FCC chair Brendan Carr was assured by David Ellison that the newly merged firm will eliminate all internal DEI programs and impose new ideological controls on CBS news and commentary.
This is capitalist oligarchy with a fascist face. Brenda Gomez, the sole Democrat on the FCC board, offered some obviously accurate commentary on the merger’s approval: the Trumpist FCC used “its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom…Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.”
+3. In the ongoing Trump-Epstein Files saga, which threatens to push offstage everything else the Trump fascist regime is doing, Herr Trump has made a brazenly dictatorial move. He has sent his Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the effective chief operating officer of the Department of Justice, to meet with the incarcerated Epstein partner Ghislane Maxwell, the sociopath who procured underage females for sexual exploitation by Epstein and his rich friends (almost certainly including Trump himself). What could this meeting (yesterday and today) possibly be about other than Maxwell offering fake evidence to pretend to exonerate the orange-tinted Dear Leader in return for clemency or a pardon from the wannabe fascist strongman for life?
It’s a safe bet that the openly lecherous Trump did in fact sexually partake in what Epstein and Maxwell had to offer: underage females.
Two fun facts: (a) Todd Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer; (b) Blanche is close friends with Maxwell’s lawyer.
The neo-Weimar US Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) may be an imperialist and corporate hack, but he’s not wrong to say this: “Sending Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, to interview Ghislaine Maxwell while she’s in prison, a woman who’s been convicted of abusing people, to offer some kind of corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump just stinks of high corruption.”
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Meanwhile in other news, as Columbia University prepares to deepen its repression of students and others who dare to protest genocide this coming fall semester, the “P”BS Newshour shows literally starving and dying children in Gaza on the “P”BS NewsHour, reporting also that the fascist Israel Defense Forces regularly murder Palestinians as they try to access food and water….and then it shifts to “our next story” with soothing music in the background. “P”BS and the rest of the giant corporate media Manufacturing Consent Complex have literally normalized GENOCIDE.
This image from the “P”BS NewsHour last night
A big, perhaps the main part of how they can show the dying and murdered Palestinian children and somehow feel okay with it is that they leave out the central role of the US Empire. They delete the fact that it is really the US-Israel genocide in Gaza. They omit the basic fact that Israel’s ethnic cleansing program has been conducted with US funding, equipping, and military and political/diplomatic protection.
One of their “next stori[es]” last night was a quick report on the fascist POTUS signing the bill that rescinds federal support for “P”BS!
If this all sounds dystopian, please understand that is actually all happening here and now – you are not reading an online political science fiction novel about some scary distant future.
My friends, colleagues, and comrades at Refuse Fascism are correct: this is fascism and a harsh historical truth made evident at great human cost in the previous century is that it is devastatingly difficult to dislodge fascists from power once they consolidate rule over state and society, If they are not separated from authority prior to the cementing of their reign, it can become too late.
No matter how they attain power, fascist rulers are never legitimate. The responsibility to expel them from power is particularly urgent when fascism threatens to consolidate control atop history’s most powerful and lethal nation in a time of deepening global climate catastrophe and a world full of ever more lethal nuclear weapons.