Is The Washington Post Now Running Scared Of The Powerful?

Satirist Andy Borowitz gets serious in this latest posting - and I agree with him. 

I am a subscriber to The Washington Post. It's because I have long admired that paper's stand in telling the truth - even when that upsets the powerful.

The Post was willing to reveal the criminality of the Nixon administration when all other media outlets were afraid to do so. That earned them a reputation that has endured for decades. And during the first Trump administration they continued that - exposing his lies and unethical behavior.

But a couple of recent moves by the paper has me worried. First, they changed a decades old policy and refused to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential race. Did they really think that both parties had credible and ethical candidates? Or were they giving in to the wishes of their billionaire owner (Jeff Bezos - who had promised to be "hands-off" with the paper)?

Then they refused to run a political cartoon by their Pulitzer-winning cartoonist - Ann Telnaes. The cartoon was not untrue or defamatory. It simply told the truth - that owner Jeff Bezos and other billionaires were now "bending the knee" to Donald Trump. 

The news media has two things that are required of them - to tell the truth and to expose the lies of the powerful. The Post has done that in the past, but these recent activities have me worried that it may not do so in the future. 

I do not want to give up my subscription to The Washington Post. But if I cannot count on them to tell the truth to power (including its owner), then I will have to do so.
 

Humor Columnist Makes The Endorsement The Washington Post Wouldn't

The following is from the humor columnist of the Washington Post (Alexandra Petri):

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.

I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

It's Not What America Needs To Hear Right Now (Satire)

More great satire from Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post: 

Now is the time for unity. Now is the time for healing. We need to stop saying things that are tearing Americans apart. Hateful, awful things like, “I, Joe Biden, am running for president of the United States.” That is not what America needs to hear right now.

It was good that Biden pulled down his ads and stopped his events and unequivocally condemned the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but his speech was not enough. As former Republican senator Jim DeMint complained online, Biden mentioned in his speech that he was seeking reelection.

Now is just not the time for such divisive rhetoric! Now is the time to lower the national temperature. Stop raising it by saying, “I still find the things that Donald Trump has said he would do if elected scary.” That kind of language has gotten us where we are and must stop. Hush, and let us instead hear from the unifiers.

Unifiers such as Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who during his remarks at the Republican National Convention did not repeat his comment from an earlier speech on political opponents about how “some folks need killing.”

Or Rep. Marjorie “We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL” Taylor Greene (Ga.), who only said something ominous about “globalists” onceduring her RNC address!

Or Senate candidate Kari Lake, who observed, “Welcome to everybody in this great arena tonight. We love you all.” Isn’t that so wonderfully unifyi— “Actually, actually, wait a minute. I don’t mean that. I don’t welcome everybody in this room. The guys up in the fake news. Frankly, you guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome.”

Now is the time to say temperate, soothing, unifying things, such as, “the Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.” Now is not the time to offer any criticism of a man who has toyed with serving an unconstitutional third term as president, televising a trial of Liz Cheney or deporting some 20 million people.

The last thing we need right now is to tear apart this country with vitriolic rhetoric like “I continue to think that Donald Trump’s plan — which his running mate, J.D. Vance, has endorsed — for replacing the civil service with political appointees is terrifying.” That kind of careless language is what has gotten us to this place. If we don’t nip this in the bud, people will say even worse things, like, “Donald Trump’s promise to be a dictator on 'Day 1’ (but just on Day 1!) still sounds ... dictatorial.”

This is certainly a good-faith argument. Don’t you dare insinuate it isn’t. If anyone else had been using any kind of hateful, threatening rhetoric, I would know about it, and I wouldn’t just be hushing the people whose violent slogans (e.g., “I didn’t enjoy the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 one bit!”) have degraded our national discourse possibly beyond repair.

Why, people are out there saying that they “are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless” if their political opponents allow it to be! Wait, this was said by the head of the Heritage Foundation? My mistake. This is unifying, actually.

Remember, this is a democracy, where we pride ourselves on free speech. But there are limits. Right now, for instance, worrying aloud about the erosion of that very right is absolutely unacceptable. Now is not the time to say, “I like having a democracy, and I still think it’s at stake this election, unless I missed something big?” Now is the time to say nothing.

McCarthy - Stop The Extremists & Pass A Budget W/Dems

From The Washington Post editorial board: 

The U.S. government will almost certainly shut down on Oct. 1, the work of ultraconservative holdouts who want to “burn the whole place down,” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) put it. Yet, for now, Mr. McCarthy does not appear willing to take away the matches. He could sideline the objectors by calling House Democrats and agreeing to pass bipartisan legislation to fund the government. . . .

 The resisters had plenty of chances to bargain, and they have refused. They won’t even approve a defense bill that has everything in it they want. And even if legislation passed the House, the Democratic-controlled Senate would reject it.

Those Democrats have good reason to object to House GOP spending-cut proposals. President Biden and Mr. McCarthy agreed in May to a 2024 and 2025 budget outline that includes some spending cuts (about$180 billion worth of savings in those two years). But the holdouts demand more — and big — cuts. They argue a government shutdown is better than approving a bipartisan budget.

If the objectors’ goal is to control government spending, as they claim, forcing a destabilizing and expensive shutdown over what amounts to only about 10 percent of the federal budget is counterproductive. They don’t want to touch Social Security or Medicare. They refuse to discuss tax policy. They want to increase spending on defense, veterans aid and border control. Their deep concern about federal spending falls entirely on a portion of the “nondefense discretionary” budget, which funds education, transportation, science research, policing, parks, support for low-income Americans and other popular programs.

Meanwhile, a shutdown would hurt the economy. Historically, consumer confidence drops during shutdowns. This could be especially harmful now, as consumers and businesses pull back on spending and banks issue fewer loans. It would also demoralize federal workers at a time when many agencies are struggling to recruit. And it would reaffirm why Fitch downgraded U.S. debt last month, a decision owing largely to political dysfunction. Moody’s — the only one of the three major credit rating agencies that has not downgraded U.S. debt — has already warned a shutdown would be a “negative” in its assessment.

In an ideal world, the House and Senate would pass the necessary 12 agency budget bills by Sept. 30. But that has rarely happened this century; instead, federal budgeting usually involves smashing funding bills into one big package and passing it at the last minute — perhaps after lawmakers have given themselves an extension. That is the only realistic course now: passing a continuing resolution to keep the federal government running until December to give lawmakers time to debate and advance a full 2024 budget. The Senate is expected to approve a bipartisan “CR” by this weekend, a deal far from what the House GOP holdouts are demanding.

There is discussion of a discharge petition in the House, through which a majority of members — Democrats and some Republicans — could force a vote on a CR without Mr. McCarthy’s approval. In return for signing such a petition, moderate Republicans could insist that a bipartisan debt commission be included in any compromise deal. They could also push for Ukraine aid and other supplemental funding requests from the White House to be offset by revenue increases or spending trims elsewhere. At some point, moderate lawmakers from both parties, who represent a much broader swath of the country than the ultra-partisans, have to retake control of the legislative process.

Yet, it is hard for even the most frustrated of moderate Republicans to break ranks with their party leadership by signing on to a discharge petition. Until that changes, Mr. McCarthy is in charge, and the speaker is worried he could lose his job if he strikes a deal with Democrats to pass a CR, because the resisters would move to oust him. He should tell them, “Good luck.” Eventually, he will have to. The only way out of this impasse — in which Republicans control just one chamber of one of the two branches of government responsible for budgeting — involves bipartisan agreement.

Mr. McCarthy can’t lead the Freedom Caucus holdouts to accept this reality. But he can win over the public by putting the nation first, standing with the majority of his own party and getting a deal done — with Democratic votes.

Don't Spend More On Defense - Just Spend Smarter

 

The following post about defense spending is by the editorial board of The Washington Post. They Are right!

War and peace have one unlikely thing in common: It isn’t hard to write a defense budget for either. Governments at war turn the spigots on; those at peace tend to shut them off. More challenging is drafting a military blueprint in a grayer zone, when U.S. troops are not in combat but requests for military aid from allies are on the rise and threats of an even bigger crisis loom. Washington has provided more than $45 billion in military aid to Ukraine since just before Russia’s invasion; there is little sign of that conflict abating. China, meanwhile, continues to creep toward Taiwan.

But that does not mean the $842 billion President Biden suggested spending on defense next year — up more than one-third from $630 billion in 2015 — should march into law unquestioned. At a time when dollars for all needs are in short supply and the nation’s debt is rising unsustainably, the question cannot be by what percentage the Defense Department’s budget should automatically grow this year. It should be:How do we ensure our military is best prepared for whatever comes?

One obvious answer: by spending smarter.

However the current debt ceiling negotiations conclude, Congress should press the civilians who oversee our military to move more quickly from crewed to uncrewed systems, to speed the shift from surface to subsurface vessels and mine warfare; to hurry investment in cyberdefenses and secure communications; and direct the services to prioritize maintenance and spares over procurement of new systems, which often arrive without the funds for ordnance, upkeep and parts that make them reliably lethal. Significant savings could be realized over the next decade while making the military more nimble and more powerful.

Congress would help matters if it stopped piling on funds for weapons and programs the Pentagon doesn’t want. Each year, lawmakers add somewhere between $15 billion and $60 billion to military budgets the Pentagon did not ask for. The Space Force, for example, received $1.7 billion more in December’s continuing resolution than the Pentagon requested. Featherbedding is so fully entrenched in the annual budget games that 19 Pentagon agencies are required by statute to report to Congress on any “unfunded priorities” they could not get past the Office of Management and Budget on their way to Capitol Hill. Those reports are an invitation for lawmakers to fund them anyway. Over a decade, that unrequested spending could, by itself, top a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Submarines, both conventional and nuclear-armed, are among the country’s greatest technological advantages. The Navy is a generation ahead of other nations below the surface and needs to stay ahead. That means building the Columbia class of nuclear missile subs and doing so in such a way that a related sub deal with Australia can also move forward. But surface shipbuilding priorities, oddly, too often resemble putting cart before horse. The Navy, dreaming of a 355-ship fleet, remains focused on building new vessels instead of maintaining those it already has. The Pentagon is far behind on ship maintenance, in both private and public shipyards; it needs to boost the ability of those facilities to repair more ships and find (or train) workers with the skills to do so. Otherwise, the Navy will continue to cannibalize parts from one ship to keep others afloat, retire vessels before the end of their useful life spans and struggle to support missions overseas because of an inability to keep the ships it already has ready for action.

Nor does it seem wise, in the era of cheap drones and relatively inexpensive missiles, to keep building large surface ships that require crews of thousands of men and women. Instead of buying a fifth Ford-class nuclear-powered carrier, it would be wiser to redirect some of those funds into renovating the undercapitalized shipyards that can keep the 293 ships that Congress has already bought combat-ready. Meanwhile, the service is woefully underinvested in both minesweeping and mine warfare at a time when these uncrewed devices can move, detect, identify and increasingly attack enemy ships on their own — with far less risk to sailors.

The Editorial Board supports an Air Force proposal, made in the interest of speeding weapons into warfighters’ hands, that would allow the Pentagon to reprogram up to $300 million per year without congressional approval. Given that Congress can take a year to approve a Pentagon budget, military planners need the flexibility to buy many items — particularly software — more quickly. But the Air Force has fairly come under questioning (even from some Senate Republicans) for spending so much on short-range fighters at the expense of longer-range strike, tanker and cargo programs. The F-35 Lightning might someday prove that it is worth the $412 billion taxpayers will spend just to build it, but it is not clear what sustaining role the fighter can play over the Taiwan Strait if pilots lack “depth of magazine” — i.e., ample munitions — they’ll need to fight. As one former Pentagon planner put it: We can send 500 fighters to Asia in a few days, but they will run out of ordnance a few days later. The Air Force needs to shift dollars out of expensive airframes and engines and into missiles — and the industrial base that can produce them.

As for the Army, it is enjoying something of a renaissance, as a number of its legacy weapons systems — from armor to artillery to a host of smart and dumb munitions — have taken center stage in Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Reagan-era Patriot missile defense system, for example, has outperformed in the theater, but the battle for control of the skies in Ukraine is a reminder that a more concerted effort by Army planners around air defense — a somewhat neglected mission inside the service — would help our allies in both Europe and Asia. At the same time, command focus on recruiting — and making the work of recruiting an important career move — would bolster the case for having more than 450,000 troops on active duty when a hefty portion of service personnel will never deploy. In general, the services all have too many people in uniform doing jobs that civilians could do. Fixing that mismatch could save nearly $20 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The Pentagon is launching an overhaul of the nuclear triad — expected to cost a half-trillion dollars or more — that should not be undertaken without fuller consideration of alternative approaches. The Air Force hopes to buy 100 B21 Raider bombers to replace the B2 and B1s; the service should revive plans to pilot some of the new bombers remotely. The Air Force also wants to modernize the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system, spread in silos across North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. That upgrade could be delayed for a decade with little threat to the nation’s ability to deter or win a nuclear conflict. Some have argued that it would be more pragmatic to convert sub-based Trident missiles for land-based silos than replace the Minuteman with a new generation of Sentinel ICBMs.

Other needs get lost in the push for big-ticket platforms. There is a shortage of predictive analytics that would help commanders anticipate attacks before they occur. The services should prioritize artificial-intelligence-driven systems to create false targets that can confuse enemies into seeing 100 planes, ships or tanks where perhaps only a dozen exist. Soldiers and sailors need more in the way of redundant communication networks and self-healing cyberdefenses to stop the enemy from disrupting command and control. And then there’s the easy stuff: Lawmakers, widely outspoken in their worry about China, have yet to fully fund the Philippine base-sharing arrangement that the Biden administration negotiated with the government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Such a move would send a strong signal of joint resolve to Beijing, especially after years of harsh words between Manila and Washington.

For much of the past eight years, Congress has not asked the Pentagon to spend more smartly. It has mostly just asked the Pentagon to spend more. It is time for a more hardheaded approach.

No One Needs (Or Should Have) An Assault Rifle

 The following is most of an editorial by the editorial board of The Washington Post:

Three adults and three children have been killed in a Nashville school shooting by a 28-year-old assailant with three guns, including at least one AR-15-style rifle.

These attacks are always heart-wrenching. But they’re not surprising anymore — neither the massacres themselves nor the weapons used to carry them out. Ten of the 17 deadliest mass killings in the United States since 2012 involved AR-15s. The names of the towns and cities where these tragedies took place have become familiar: Newtown, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Parkland, Uvalde and beyond. The Post chronicles the journey this now-iconic rifle took from military-issued firearm to off-the-shelf bestseller, and underscores the danger in the public’s embrace of a weapon the Defense Department once lauded for its “phenomenal lethality.”

“I don’t know why anyone needs an AR-15,” President Donald Trump reportedly told aides in August 2019 after back-to-back mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso. There’s no good answer. The AR-15 was designed for soldiers, yet its associations with warfare eventually became a selling point for everyday buyers. “Use what they use,” exhorted one ad displaying professionals wielding tactical rifles. Now, about 1 in 20 U.S. adults own at least one AR-15. That’s roughly 16 million people, storing roughly 20 million guns designed to mow down enemies on the battlefield with brutal efficiency. Two-thirds of these were crafted in the past decade — and when more people die, popularity doesn’t fall. Instead, it rises.

The AR-15, The Post explains, is materially different from traditional handguns. The rifle fires very small bullets at very fast speeds. The projectiles don’t move straight and smooth through human targets like those from a traditional handgun. Their velocity turns them unstable upon penetration, so that they tumble through flesh and vital organs. This so-called blast effect literally tears people apart. A trauma surgeon notes, “you don’t see the muscle … just bone and skin and missing parts.” Another mentions tissue that “crumbled into your hands.”

A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that “disintegrated” a toddler’s skull.

This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.

Even thinking about these injuries is horrifying, so much so that crime scene photos are often kept confidential. But the gruesome reality of what an AR-15 can wreak poses an argument in itself: There is no excuse for the widespread availability of these weapons of war.

What The WaPo Staff Learned About The AR-15 Rifle

 From the staff of The Washington Post:

The AR-15 is more than a weapon.

It is a potent symbol with a grip on the American imagination — a readily available and easy-to-use killing machine wielded during some of the country’s darkest moments, and a tactical weapon championed as the ultimate expression of Second Amendment rights. It is also a lucrative consumer product with a distinct appeal: The more controversial it becomes, the better it sells.

To understand the AR-15 and its impact, The Washington Post interviewed more than 200 people with expertise or relevant firsthand experience — including firearms industry executives and lobbyists, gun owners, shooting survivors and victims’ families, lawmakers, trauma surgeons, first responders, activists, armed militants, academics and ballistics experts, among others. Our seven-month examination also relied on a review of more than 1,000 pages of documents, including internal company records, court and regulatory filings, and autopsy reports, many of them obtained through public records requests. And, in the most detailed poll of its kind to date, The Post partnered with Ipsos to survey hundreds of AR-15 owners about their reasons for having the weapon.

Here’s what we learned:

A flip by the gun industry: The AR-15’s rise over the past two decades was sparked by a dramatic reversal in strategy by the country’s biggest gun companies to invest in a product that many in the industry had long viewed as anathema to their culture and traditions. The industry embraced the gun’s political and cultural significance as a marketing advantage as it looked for new revenue. Manufacturers rode a post-9/11 surge in military admiration while also stoking a desire among new gun owners to personalize their weapons with tactical accessories. Gun companies seeking to rebrand the AR-15 have used images of police and soldiers wielding tactical rifles in the field, urging civilian buyers to, as one ad put it, “use what they use.”

Spikes in consumer demand: While handguns account for the most gun-related killings in the United States, sales of AR-15s surge in times of tragedy and political change. They soared in the run-up to the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and after the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, and again ahead of the turbulent 2020 presidential election. AR-15s, which once accounted for a small fraction of guns produced in the United States, now represent nearly 1 in 4, according to industry and government figures.

Who owns AR-15s and why: About 1 in 20 U.S. adults — or about 16 million people — own at least one AR-15, according to new polling data from The Post and Ipsos. Self-defense is the most popular reason for owning one, with many respondents also citing recreation, target shooting and hunting. Compared with Americans as a whole, AR-15 owners are more likely to be White, male and between the ages of 40 and 65. They’re also more likely than adults overall to be Republican and to live in states Donald Trump won in 2020. The industry, meanwhile, has shifted operations in many cases to more culturally welcoming terrain. Numerous firearms, ammunition and gun accessory companies have moved headquarters or production facilities from liberal to conservative states, where communities see the companies as sources of jobs, not controversy.

The gun’s brutal efficiency: The AR-15’s mechanics, which allow shooters to easily fire bullets at a high velocity in rapid succession, make the weapon lethal and destructive. When the bullets penetrate the body, they create a blast effect that blows up organs and pulverizes bones. The weapon’s power magnifies the impact of gun violence, both because of the number of victims and, for survivors, the long-lasting effects on physical and mental health. In Sutherland Springs, Tex., where more than two dozen people were killed during an eight-minute rampage in 2017, the additional 20 people injured continue to grapple with debilitating, lifelong conditions such as paralysis or infertility. More than 90 percent of gun-related homicides involve handguns, according to the FBI, but 10 of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass killings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.

Escalating arsenals: In response to years of right-wing violence and intimidation linked to the AR-15, some far-left activists have begun to form armed groups, billed as community defense, often turning to the AR-15 as their weapon, as well. Some leftist activists who long favored nonviolence have grown more tolerant of armed support at public events as threats against the LGBTQ community and other vulnerable groups rise and faith in law enforcement recedes.

Outgunned police: Police departments that once deferred to SWAT teams wielding military-style rifles for active-shooter situations have started equipping officers with AR-15s and other long guns, as those weapons have flooded the neighborhoods they patrol. Many officers welcome the change, some buying their own AR-15s and using them for sport. But police often say they still feel outgunned and ill-prepared — hampered by a lack of training and by public demands that they do everything possible to avoid using force.

A path to fewer deaths: Many gun violence experts and law enforcement veterans say that restricting the sizes of ammunition magazines would lessen the carnage caused by AR-15s and other guns. Smaller capacity magazines would force shooters to pause during their attacks to reload, allowing people to flee or fight back, research shows. Most states do not limit magazine sizes, but in the past year, four states have capped them at anywhere from 10 to 17 rounds. Such efforts face growing legal challenges, and the issue could ultimately wind up before the Supreme Court.

Seven Important Things We Learned In 2022

The year is starting to come to a close, and Jennifer Rubin (pictured) has written an op-ed for The Washington Post detailing seven things we learned in 2022.

1) The media embarrassed themselves by accepting GOP narratives so willingly. Rarely has so much cynical political punditry been so wrong. The public will tune out the House Jan. 6 select committee and the hearings would be boring, many in the media predicted. The 2022 midterms would be a red wave, they said. President Biden’s term was a failure with scant achievements. Yet the select committee’s hearings turned out to be gripping (and perhaps motivated the Justice Department to move more expeditiously in its Jan. 6-related investigations); regardless what happens in Georgia Tuesday, Democrats performed unexpectedly well in the midterms; and Biden racked up some impressive wins (e.g., the Chips and Science Act, the Pact Act, the Inflation Reduction Act). Not coincidentally, each of these colossally wrong takes were Republican talking points that solidified into conventional wisdom. The media must do better.

2) When antidemocratic insurgents tell you who they are, believe them. Democracy really is at risk. Biden, whom the media derided for warning about the MAGA movement’s “semi-fascism” and the dangers of election denial, correctly grasped the threat to constitutional government that former president Donald Trump and his acolytes pose. Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig highlighted this “clear and present danger” in his testimony before the Jan. 6 committee. Sure enough, a flock of election deniers appeared on the ballot this year; Trump threatened there would be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he were indicted; prominent members of the GOP attacked the FBI for carrying out a lawful search warrant; and Trump eventually called for the “termination” of the Constitution.

3) Authoritarianism is weaker than democracy. Authoritarian regimes this year revealed their inherent brittleness and ineptitude. We witnessed Russia’s disastrous war of aggression against Ukraine; China’s ongoing debilitation from covid-19; Iran’s massive street demonstrations; and Turkey’s worsening economic conditions. Altogether, they underscore the underlying weakness of strongmen who try to crush dissent and oppose the free flow of information. For all their faults, democracies remain best able to handle crises, enlist the imagination of their people and provide opportunity for the greatest number of people.

4) The covid-19 pandemic has created a mental health crisis for youths that will result in long-term suffering if not addressed. While we may have weathered the worst of the covid crisis, thanks to the combination of private-sector scientific excellence and the federal government’s competency, we have not returned to “normal.” The Post reports, “Nationally, adolescent depression and anxiety — already at crisis levels before the pandemic — have surged amid the isolation, disruption and hardship of covid-19.” That, combined with the shortage of mental health professionals and the nearly quarter of a million children who have lost a parent, means it is not realistic to expect schools to manage the problem on their own. A private-public response as substantial as the one for the pandemic is required.

5) American women will not return to the 1950s. The Supreme Court’s notion that the 14th Amendment’s meaning was fixed in the 19th century, thereby excluding women’s rights to bodily integrity, is unsustainable. The court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade triggered a furious political backlash, first evidenced in Kansas’s vote rejecting the removal of abortion rights from the state constitution and again in the midterms, when all five abortion-related measures on state ballots resulted in pro-choice victories. Indeed, pro-choice turnout in the midterms helped Democrats keep the Senate and minimize losses in the House.

6) Social media companies are far less stable than once thought. As Ian Bogost recently wrote for the Atlantic: “Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform.” The speed with which Musk is incinerating his $44 billion investment is particularly shocking. One study found that there are “no signs currently of the #TwitterMigration to platforms such as Mastodon or The Post or the others slowing down at this point.” It’s unknown whether a single alternative or multiple smaller platforms may emerge or whether information-sharing might go back to a more deliberate pace based on direct human interaction. But those who believe that allowing a few moguls to control social media is destructive and antidemocratic have reason to welcome whatever comes next.

7) The courts remain a bulwark for democracy. The Supreme Court, between its radical departure from precedent, the outpouring of partisan rhetoric from its right-wing members and its refusal to adopt a binding set of ethics rules, managed to fall to record-low levels of trust among Americans. Thankfully, there is more to the American judicial system than the high court. Other judges and juries continued to render justice, including tough sentences for the killers of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery; the verdicts and stiff sentences for Jan. 6 insurrectionists; the multiple acquittals in bogus cases brought by special counsel John Durham; and Trump’s repeated failure to find a court that would recognize his “absolute immunity” from civil lawsuits. Yes, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon was widely ridiculed for her indefensible rulings in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. But even then, an appellate court managed to straighten things out. Courts are not perfect, but they provide a key guardrail for our democratic system.