What happened to the media

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 132

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

22 Jul 2025 — 8 min read

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OUTSIDE READINGS DEP'T.

And What Does "Humiliation" Mean?

GOOD AFTERNOON! Your editor is running an interstate errand today, so here are some things from other publications that he found worth reading, on topics of interest to this newsletter:

Last week, Rusty Foster, at Today in Tabs, wrote a straightforward headline package and backed it up even more straightforwardly:

Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose
It's not a conspiracy, it's simply what happened.

...Earlier this week I met someone new and he asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I’m a writer,” and he said “Oh, what do you write?” This conversation happens often enough, and in virtually the same words, that I recognized right away where we were headed. I told him about Tabs and at that point although my new friend didn’t know it yet, we were already on a greased slide toward the moment where I would say: “…but these days I only write it once or twice a week, because the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires.”

“I realize that sounds a little crazy!” I always add with an apologetic laugh, because while outwardly he’s nodding and making a polite “oh really!” face, I can tell that on the inside he’s expecting me to bring up MKULTRA and possibly the JFK assassination next. But it’s not crazy, and you don’t need to believe in any conspiracy theories to see what’s happened.

Yesterday, the Verge published a piece providing some grim context about the hacker who stole millions of people's personal information from Columbia and, with a racist blogger as his intermediary, laundered his stolen material into a collaboration with the New York Times to attack the city's Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, about Mamdani's ethnic self-identification on the college application he submitted, unsuccessfully, when he was a teenager. The hacker, it turns out, is even more exuberantly racist than his go-between; where the go-between's pseudonym was an allusion to anti-Muslim policies in French colonial Algeria, for instance, the hacker's online handle is an outright racial slur, so the Verge settled for referring to them as "the Anime Nazi":

Social media reviewed by The Verge — including X and fediverse accounts — shows a series of reposts of statements and images such as swastikas, “miss u hitler,” and “minorities have no place in our world.” The Anime Nazi themselves posted such things as “I am racist,” “I am violently racist toward black people,” and a picture of a unicorn sitting on a swastika...

The New York Times, which published the story about Mamdani’s Columbia application, made no mention of the Anime Nazi in its report. The Mamdani data is credited to “Crémieux,” a publicly known pseudonym for Jordan Lasker, a prominent internet eugenicist....Lasker wrote about the Columbia hack on June 24th and was, according to The New York Times, the intermediary by which the paper received Mamdani’s hacked Columbia application. Reporting from Mother Jones suggests Lasker may have a neo-Nazi history of his own.

Benjamin Ryan, the first byline on the Times’ story about Mamdani, follows the alleged hacker on X. Ryan is the only non-staffer on the story and also the only non-political reporter. He typically writes about science for the Times, and often about trans kids in his newsletter. Ryan is a subscriber of Lasker’s email newsletter, Cremieux Recueil, according to the “reads” section of the Substack app. It is not terribly difficult to figure out why Ryan is credited on the story — he is the reporter most likely to have gotten ahold of the application. Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times, the Verge noted, limited its description of the motivation for the hack—carried out by one outspoken online racist and promoted by another—to writing that it “appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023.”

In Liberal Currents yesterday, Toby Buckle wrote about the politics of humiliation, working from the definition that "[h]umiliation is the forced recognition of domination":

It's often opined that Trump would be more effective if he were capable of some restraint. That a truly dangerous autocrat would mask his designs better. This not only misses a huge part of his appeal, but what one of the central aims of this movement is.

Many millions of Americans love Trump because he routinely humiliates people. It validates their own actions. They live vicariously though him, imagining the humiliation they could inflict if they were given greater power. He also normalizes the behaviour. The symbolic power of having someone of his open sadism in the Oval Office is massive. It is changing our society, making humiliation much more acceptable, and corroding the norms that partially restrain humiliators.

WEATHER REVIEWS

Blue sky with a white cloud in the upper right corner and an oddly depthless gray cloud overlapping the bottom of the white cloud, taking up most of the lower right quadrant.

New York City, July 21, 2025

★★★ The approach to the windows, to open them onto the relative cool of the morning, found the air conditioners already silent. White clouds in sizes from scraps to piles drifted slowly past the upthrust tips of top branches. An insect kept up a steady chirp. Feet in plastic slides started to sweat a little, unexpectedly, giving the lie to the apparent neutrality of the temperature. Out on Central Park West, a red-tailed hawk made a pair of upward swoops like a black bag caught in the wind and then came to a landing, its colors catching the light, on the peak of a window pediment on the top floor of a corner turret. In the Park, sudden cloud shade left eyes swimming in residual green. More than a dozen sunbathers were out on the Great Hill in the Monday midafternoon. "Got Your Money" played from a bench.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!

Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!

ADVICE DEP'T.

HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

BANANA SANDWICH

Slice very ripe bananas and mix with mayonnaise dressing. Add spoonful or two of grated nuts and spread between slices of buttered bread.

NUT SANDWICH

Use amount of grated nuts desired and to this add enough Neufchatel cheese and thick cream to make a paste. Flavor with maple sugar and spread between buttered slices of whole-wheat bread.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .