Good morning. It is April 29th. Another cool, pleasant morning in New York City on its way to being a quite warm afternoon. A day for figuring out that last year's end of season clearance sale shorts made it to clearance because their color is incompatible with like 90 % of the available t-shirts, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

The people of Canada cast their votes yesterday and the results are that conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who three months ago was cruising to a blowout victory and a future as prime minister, not only lost his party the election, but couldn't hold on to his own seat in parliament. Mark Carney's Liberal Party may or may not win an outright majority, but they're set up to be in control of the new government and the conservatives are securely in the minority. Canada's swift pivot away from the right, apparently inspired by the bumbling fascist takeover of the country to their south, did not help out the Canadian left. The New Democratic Party did so badly, it's due to lose its official status as a party in parliament. And its leader, Jagmeet Singh, like the conservative Poilievre, lost his own seat. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story is “Changes Set Off Exodus At Civil Rights Division Of Justice Department / Lawyers Cite Less Focus on Marginalized,” another extremely understated sub headline, what the lawyers who are fleeing the justice department are complaining about, in fact, according to the story, is that the civil rights division is being shut down as a civil rights division, to be retooled into what the story describes as “an enforcement arm for President Trump's agenda against state and local officials, college administrators, and student protesters, among others.” The Times writes, “‘Now, over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,’ Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the division, said in an interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck over the weekend, welcoming the turnover and making plain the division’s priorities.”

“‘We don't want people in the federal government who feel like it's their pet project to go persecute police departments, she said.’ The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.’” And really you can fill in the whole rest of the story from there, given that Harmeet Dhillon, a far right legal crusader who was actively involved in trying to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, is running the office of civil rights and doing her media outreach through Glenn Beck. What does civil rights enforcement look like in the hands of people who are fundamentally opposed to civil rights? The Times writes, “inside the division, there have been discussions about scrapping long established consent decrees with police departments and instead bringing cases against liberal cities to loosen their gun restrictions, according to people familiar with the discussions. Lawyers have also been assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services or moved elsewhere in the Justice Department to pursue the Justice Department's crackdown against student protesters, and the universities they attend under the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism.” 

Next to that on page one is a photo package leading to the inside of the paper in which the Times treats a fairly important story in the most unimportant way possible. The headline on the pictures is “How the Trump White House Reshapes Media Coverage.” At the top of the page, there's a picture of a crowded White House briefing room with people's hands raised, under the Trump administration. Below that is the Biden administration briefing room, which is the same room, less crowded and the people aren't raising their hands. There are more pictures inside the paper in a visual explainer package that spreads full width across two pages and reaches well down below the fold. It includes a seating chart of the briefing room, pictures of the briefing room with various figures darkened and lightened to, not to life, but a little less far away from life. The point of all this is that press secretary Caroline Levitt, whose name for the purposes of this, had to call up a video to remind myself of how to pronounce, makes a habit of calling on various propagandists and weirdos that the White House has now salted the room with. The introduction to the package says that “long time White House reporters say the result has been an erosion of their independence. They say the increased attention toward pro-Trump media personalities who rarely challenge the administration's talking points has undercut the briefings as a space to relay accurate information to the American public and hold the president to account.” That's a mighty highfalutin and self-important way of talking about the complacent and cynical traditional ritual of establishment journalists asking shallow and badgering questions at a press conference, to try to advance some inane agreed upon storyline in the news cycle, ideally by catching out the administration in some minor inconsistency. But the magic of the second Trump administration is that it relentlessly and reliably finds a way to replace the worst features of our previous political culture with something unambiguously much worse. If you go past the seating chart showing you that Fox News is in the front row while the New York Times and NPR are in the second row and that there's now a little jump seat designated for new media right off to the right of the press secretary, you get to the part where the Times finally, in a very lightweight typeface, chronicles some of the questions that the White House has been asked, or perhaps has arranged to be asked, from that seat or from the people around the edges of the room, including someone from the Ruthless Podcast asking, “Caroline, in your first briefing, the media went after this administration for deporting illegal immigrants they claimed were not criminals. My question is, do you think they're out of touch with Americans demanding action on our border crisis?” And someone from the Gateway Pundit asking, “does the administration have any comment on leftist state and local officials defying ICE and Trump's deportation efforts?” And someone from the MyPillowGuy, Mike Lindell's LindellTV outlet, asking, “will you guys also consider releasing the president's fitness plan? He actually looks healthier than ever before, healthier than he did eight years ago. And I'm sure everybody in this room could agree. Is he working out with Bobby Kennedy? And is he eating less McDonald’s?” But because the story deems the internal dynamics of the White House press room, to inherently fascinating instead of focusing exclusively on the time-wasting fascist suck-ups who are the news story and who represent the administration's attempt to fully poison the basic daily interchange between the White House and the press, the Times also thinks it's necessary to point out that from the new media seat, someone from Semaphore was able to ask whether there would be additional rounds of Elon Musk's emails demanding that civil servants give weekly reports on their job performance. And this one from Breaking Points, asks the extremely old fashioned White House briefing room news-fishing question, “can the White House just tell and assure Americans today that there's not going to be a recession?” Who cares? Nobody needs a complete and balanced and boring picture of what goes on in the White House briefing room. The whole point is that you're supposed to figure out what's newsworthy and interesting and bring it back, and if you're transcribing those dull questions at the expense of informing readers about the kind of stuff that Tim Pool is jabbering from the new seat, you're not conveying the story. 

Below the briefing room pictures on page one, below the fold, there's a piece of NEWS ANALYSIS. “Few Repairs Seen for Smashed Economic Order / As Trump Erodes Trust, World Will Adjust.” Nothing really new here, just a Round up of the implications of cutting American science and governance, abandoning foreign aid, becoming an unreliable trading partner, and overall being the kind of country that would actually let Donald Trump become president for a second term after having seen his first one, and allow him to pursue his agenda without regard for the obvious legal and practical limits he's violating. The piece does not address the ultimate underlying question about how the rest of the world will regard the United States after Trump is gone, which practically speaking, will probably be determined by how many of the people currently running the country end up in prison. 

Just above the fold on the right-hand side of the page, there's a pair of articles whose adjacency sends a depressing message about the Times as a worldview. On the left is a CONGRESSIONAL MEMO, “Democrats Aim To Play Offense On Rivals’ Cuts,” in which the upcoming legislative work of Congress is analyzed as a tactical messaging opportunity for Democrats to position themselves. “Out of power, disorganized and stung by their November election losses, Democrats have struggled to mount a coherent response to President Trump as he has unleashed a blitz of contentious nominations, explosive executive orders, and an unforeseen rampage by Elon Musk and his acolytes through the executive branch. Now, with Congress back from its spring recess on Monday,” the Times writes, “and Republicans under pressure to deliver on a legislative agenda, Democrats believe they have a prime opportunity for a reset. Republicans will be forced to begin providing politically charged specifics of their tax and spending program, handing the minority ample fodder for attacks.” After the jump, the story talks about how the Democrats “plan to call special attention to possible Medicaid cuts, an issue they have raised repeatedly in recent months,” then follows that up by writing “Republicans have insisted that their legislation will not eliminate health insurance or other benefits for those who need them, including Medicaid coverage.” And then the debate goes back to Democrats and independent budget analysts saying that “if Republicans have any hope of meeting their budget targets,” as the Times puts it, “they will have to wring significant savings out of the joint federal state program for low-income Americans.” So there's both sides of a dispute, over the policy substance, that would undergird what is principally a communication strategy. 

Back to page one. In the next column, the headline is, “G.O.P. Populist Finds His Lane Next to Trump,” accompanied by a portrait of that GOP populist framed in a golden lighted archway so that he looks like a particularly pinched-faced Byzantine icon with the caption, “Senator Josh Hawley refused to vote for cuts to Medicaid.” When the democrats take that position, it's a position being taken on debatable grounds of substance, when Josh Hawley does it, he's just doing the thing because he means what he says. “Since his arrival to the senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member,” the Times writes, “Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses, as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes, and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent, on many populist issues. ‘His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,’ said Matt Stoller, a former senator to Mr. Sanders.” Matt Stoller is a hopelessly gullible mark, driven by a deep resentment of any sort of claims of justice, other than anti-anti-racist pure economic redistribution, but that's exactly what a respectful profile of Josh Hawley needs, to stay respectful. The Times does work its way around to Hannah German, a professor at NYU, who notes that Hawley says “he wants more industry in America, but voted against all the Biden initiatives because they were too woke. There's always a cultural program to use as an excuse not to advance a serious policy.” But mostly the point is to take Hawley at face value, which provides quite a contrast on the jump page to the headline at the top, which is, “Pritzker thunders against do-nothing Democrats stoking 2028 talk.” This is about how Illinois governor JP Pritzker at a democratic event in Manchester, New Hampshire told the crowd “it's time to fight everywhere and all at once. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. The reckoning is finally here.” Yes, he was in New Hampshire. And yes, he may well have his eye on the White House in the future. But we're more than three and half years out from the next presidential election. And what the man was saying was that people need to get out in the streets, immediately. If it's a gambit for 2028, it's also, more directly, the thing that it says it is, Right now.

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by joe MacLeod The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners keep us going through your paid subscriptions to indignity and your tips. Please do send those in if you can. And if nothing too unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.