Good morning. It is a sunny day in New York City. The Blue Jays are screaming for some reason. It's a great day to go out and get yourself a flu shot and a COVID shot if you haven't already, while you still can. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom SCOCCA, taking a look at the day and the news. Karen Attia, the last black person working at the Washington Post opinion section.

announced this morning that the Post fired her, apparently for the infraction of posting accurate observations about, and a verbatim quote from, the late Charlie Kirk, as an alliance between the far-right, the Republican-controlled US government, and the people who consider themselves the leadership of the liberal establishment, has presided over a multi-day frenzy of firings and public rebukes.

of people who ventured to describe Charlie Kirk as anything other than a great beloved American, a champion of constructive discourse, and a martyr to a violent and intolerant political climate that he had absolutely no role in creating. At the moment, the climate of censorship and retribution seems to be running even hotter than it did in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, or at least then. The authorities were responding.

however brutishly, stupidly, and opportunistically to a genuine moment of national trauma, here the punishments themselves are part of the process of trying to turn the shooting of somebody who most people didn't know about or care about into a moment of national trauma. To that end, Vice President J.D. Vance, who you may remember from last week, blew off the New York 9-11 Memorial to fly out to Utah to participate in the Charlie Kirk morning.

is now scheduled to host the Charlie Kirk show today. On the front of this morning's New York Times print edition, on the fold below a set of pictures from Lisbon in the aftermath of the fatal funicular accident there, the update on the Kirk killing, one column wide, is accused gunman called a leftist, Governor Kirk's suspect became radicalized. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah

The Times writes, Sunday provided new information about the background and political leanings of the 22-year-old accused of killing Charlie Kirk, saying that the suspect had a leftist ideology and had also been in a romantic relationship with a partner who was transitioning from male to female. Mr. Cox, speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, described the suspect, Tyler Robinson, as a very normal young man who appeared to have been radicalized sometime after he dropped out of college

and moved back to his hometown in southern Utah, where he had spent the past few years. The story continues, Mr. Cox did not go into specifics about Mr. Robinson's ideological views or offer details to substantiate his assessment of the suspects views. Mr. Cox said Mr. Robinson had spent much of his time immersed in online gaming, message boards, and parts of what the governor called the deep dark internet. Sounds like the governor did not so much provide new information as

provide new assertions, backed by a notable shortage of information. The guy who reportedly inscribed various nihilistic shit-poster memes on his ammo was too online. You don't say. On the Jump page, A-17, down at the bottom, the Times has a story delving into those inscriptions. In a news conference on Friday morning, the Times writes, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, said that the phrase, Hey, fascist, catch,

clearly showed the gunman's intent. I think that speaks for itself, he said. The story delivers that quote after it's already explained to a great extent why the quote does not in fact speak for itself. Even the reference to fascism, the Times writes, has a clear echo in Helldivers 2, a satirical science fiction game in which the player battles an alien invasion on behalf of an earth that is ruled by a thinly veiled fascistic government. That is, even before the quote

started propagating as a piece of internet culture. It was a piece of dialogue in which a fascist character was calling someone else a fascist. Who knows how many more layers of ironic reversal it passed through before ending up written on a bullet casing in a gun allegedly used to kill an avatar and promoter of actual fascism. The explainer of the world really needs is how you write something on a bullet. The headline describes the messages as etched.

which seems a little fussy and also a little chemically questionable for doing to live ammo. Maybe it's just a fine point Sharpie. I guess we do already know the guy had a steady hand. The lead story on the front of the paper, two columns wide, is an investigative feature in Oklahoma institution, Hell on Earth for Patients. Investigation finds assaults and torture of developmentally disabled victims. It's a horrifying story about pretty much what its headline describes.

It's also a strange package in the ongoing relationship between the New York Times and depleted remains of American journalism as a whole. It's the sort of story that the Times tends to do nowadays in partnership with either a national public-minded investigative shop or some local good journalism startup. Here though, it just seems to be a classic New York Times parachute mission.

who look at a scandal at the Robert Greer Center, operated by the private for-profit company Liberty Healthcare, that Oklahomans had already been looking at. After an opening anecdote about a whistleblower reporting abuse and facing retaliation, after the jump, the Times writes, while Greer has received widespread attention in Oklahoma, the New York Times interviewed two key insiders for the first time. Appir Tabayasin, the whistleblower in the lead, as well the Times writes,

as an elusive former resident who provided a rare firsthand account of what happened and emerged as a critical potential witness who could open the door to criminal prosecutions. This article is also based on dozens of accounts from families, regulators, the police, and Liberty employees, as well as police reports, court affidavits, and personnel records. Photographs and medical records documented years of injuries, as did decades of Greer's own internal abuse reports, along with recordings of interviews with victims and suspects.

It certainly seems like the Times used its resources to add new and valuable reporting to the story, but there's something not only uncollegial, but perverse and unilluminating about telling the story of what was clearly a public scandal and the response to the public scandal while squeezing the public side of it out of the narrative. You have to get to the very final section of the story on the second page of the spread after the jump before the Times writes,

The controversy over Greer generated months of headlines and local news outlets like the Frontier and the Oklahoman, which reported last year that the Department of Human Services was seeking to continue the state's contract with Liberty. The story then recounts how Liberty ended up not getting its contract renewed with Oklahoma, leaving this whole effort by the Times as some sort of investigative retrospective after other people's reporting already got the results.

Below that Oklahoma story on page one, there's a pair of stories about how Donald Trump's constituencies are not getting everything that they would have hoped for from the government. On the left, the headline is Pesticide Plan by GOP Irks Maha Moms. For years, the Times writes, the pesticide manufacturer Bayer has battled thousands of lawsuits claiming that its weed killer Roundup causes cancer in people who use it frequently. Now the Republican controlled Congress could deliver the company a crucial victory.

The provision tacked into a government spending bill could shield Bayer and other pesticides makers from billions of dollars in payouts to plaintiffs. The proposal follows intense lobbying by Bayer and other industry interests over the past year, but it has sparked outrage from a force in Washington, followers of the Make America Healthy Again movement. The controversy, the Times writes, highlights tensions within President Trump's political base over the pesticides in the nation's food supply. Tensions flared this month after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

released a report on childhood help that disappointed many Maha activists who felt it didn't go far enough to rein in pesticides. The divisions within the president's base could resurface ahead of the midterm elections next fall. That account of things goes a little astray because the Times is insisting on using the word base, which apparently grows out of its institutional belief that Donald Trump has been granted the mandate of heaven by all disgruntled Americans. But what it's really describing is

tensions within a coalition in which Donald Trump, who five years ago was overseeing a high speed vaccine production program, saw the opportunity to get the anti-vax individualist health conspiracist movement to join his team by pandering to their resentment of public health. But his recruitment of those people has always been in conflict with the belief of his actual base.

that poisoning the environment is an expression of American strength and prosperity, and that environmentalists are dangerous subversives and entertaining targets to abuse in the culture wars. So Republicans are willing to own the libs by dismantling vaccination in America, but they will never be willing to stop dumping poison in the environment, nor to allow corporations to suffer any consequences for the harm they inflict on people. It's one thing to ruin the lives of civil servants, it's quite another to inconvenience Bayer. But the president's loyalty to business interests is not absolute, or at least not effectual. The adjoining story under the news analysis tag is, the border, Trump favors business first. President Trump, the Times writes, entered the White House in January, promising both the largest deportation program in American history and a golden age for American businesses. But in recent weeks, the tension between those two promises has spilled out into the open.

leading Mr. Trump to reverse or contradict some of his most significant anti-immigration policies when they threatened to disrupt the economy. Okay, but there's a world of difference between reversing the policies and contradicting the policies. What the story really documents is that the runaway xenophobia of the Trump administration tends to crash right through whatever rhetorical concessions the president may make toward wishing his administration wasn't doing the damage that it's doing. So the story says,

Mr. Trump faced an uproar this month after immigration agents arrested nearly 500 workers, most of them South Korean citizens, at the construction site of an electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia. The raid sparked anger in South Korea, a key U.S. ally and trading partner, and had the potential to discourage exactly the kind of foreign investment in U.S. manufacturing that Mr. Trump wants. Even though the Trump administration had argued the workers were in the United States illegally,

Mr. Trump temporarily paused the deportations to consider allowing the South Korean workers to stay in the United States and help finish the factory, according to officials in Seoul. Most of the workers did end up returning to South Korea. Right. The even so part is not even so Trump altered for 24 hours. The even so part is those workers are gone and similarly situated. South Korean manufacturing experts are also getting the heck out of the country.

because they don't want to be shackled for a week and made to lick up water like dogs as punishment for having been in America setting up factories and training American workers. Similarly, the story goes on to say, in June, Mr. Trump recognized that his immigration agenda was taking a toll on certain industries, including agriculture. Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, longtime workers away from them.

those jobs being almost impossible to replace," he wrote on social media. That same day, officials sent out guidance telling agents to largely avoid enforcement at work sites in certain industries, including hotels and restaurants. Days later, officials appeared to backtrack on the guidance and claim that all operations would remain on the table. If you take a look at this week's grocery bill, you can get a pretty clear sense of which side won the argument about whether to continue ethnic cleansing in the agricultural sector.

It wasn't the people who wanted to keep the farm workers on the job. 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. Keep sending those in if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.