My longtime Inquirer colleague Stephanie Farr had a great column last week confirming what most Philadelphians feel in our bones, that autumn is now the most wonderful time of the year. True, some of that may be the not-good development that climate change has created an endless summer, but also there’s the return of the Eagles (“Go Birds!” and everything else Hannah Einbinder said Sunday night) and Phillies’ Red October. But can we fully enjoy the season in Philly when the country founded here is falling apart? Autumn is great, but I’m consumed by *the fall.*
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The Post was the paper of my youthful dreams. I just canceled it
It sounds like another cliché but I mean this in a weirdly literal way: For more than a half-century, going back to my dorky adolescence at age 14, the Washington Post has been the newspaper of this career journalist’s dreams.
It’s true in the classic hope-and-ambition sense: turning the swimming-pool soggy pages of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men at summer day camp in 1974 and knowing right then that I wanted to devote my life to doing what they did, and — fingers crossed — maybe someday in the same storied newsroom.
Flash forward exactly 10 years to 1984 and my one and only job interview at the Post suggested a very different dream: that chronic one where you are hopelessly late (and maybe half-dressed!) for the appointment of your lifetime. Stuck in traffic on I-95 for hours, I jumped out of a moving car at 2:59 for my 3 p.m. interview there, only to have six different editors tell me I wasn’t Post material — at least not yet — and later confide to my college friend on the staff that maybe (subtext: nerd!) I should consider business writing.
In fact, and here’s where a personal essay riffing on this week’s news gets weird (as promised), I still regularly have nocturnal dreams about the Post, including one about a year ago where I was acing a job tryout until a citywide blackout forced me to run through clogged streets to get there on time, and another just a couple weeks ago in which the legendary Ben Bradlee was still alive and my editor — and I asked him for a giant raise.
OK, I’ve been burying the lede of this column (maybe that’s why they didn’t hire me?), probably because what I’m about to say is so utterly heartbreaking.
On Monday, we canceled our longtime digital subscription to the Post. As Neil Young — a rare boyhood hero who hasn’t sold out — once sang, shoulda been done long ago. The last straw was an action so outrageously offensive — and so counter to the values that I’d once celebrated in the Post — that I could not bear to spend one more second on their subscription rolls. They fired their last remaining Black opinion writer and the newsroom’s moral beacon, Karen Attiah.
Attiah became the latest and most high-profile victim of a nationwide conservative panic in which a fascistic right-wing movement, led by the president and vice president of the United States, is using the murder of ally Charlie Kirk, who believed (in a limited way) in free speech to wage a holy war against those with differing opinions about Kirk. The victims have included MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd, college professors and deans, schoolteachers, and more.
If Ben Bradlee was still alive outside of my weirdo dreams and if the grownups who gave you Watergate and the Pentagon Papers were still running the Post, it’s a safe bet that the renowned newspaper would be leading the charge to defend the First Amendment against these infidels, not piling on this immoral contagion.
But we’re 51 years after the Post played a role in driving Richard Nixon from the White House, and a dozen years into its up-and-then-sharply down ownership by one of Earth’s richest humans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, that’s driven off most of its superstars. The provocatively outspoken Attiah may have already been a target even before Kirk was assassinated and the world went mad.
You might think from her firing that Attiah might have somehow celebrated the death of a conservative rabble-rouser, but the veteran Post journalist did no such thing. Her Bluesky posts on the day Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University largely addressed the need for gun control, and she also posted one direct, verified quote from Kirk — one in which the Turning Point USA co-founder mocked successful Black women.
As I write this on Monday night, the Post has refused to say why Attiah was dismissed, a development the columnist revealed herself in an online post. (Monday night, the Status newsletter published her firing email, which cites her postings about “white men.”) Attiah wrote that “the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable’, ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false.” Based on the known facts, it’s hard to disagree.
As with everything else in the unforgettable nightmare of a week, the layers of irony here are thick and painful to contemplate. Attiah is a fierce, actual champion of free speech, who founded the Post’s Global Opinions section in 2016 and grew close to one of her paper’s brightest lights, a U.S.-based Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi.
When Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salmon and his goons murdered Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, Attiah wrote about her friend and the need for real justice with passion and intensity — winning a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors. Her message was clear: that doing nothing about the murder of a Post journalist by a key U.S. ally was a threat to press freedom everywhere. Now, Attiah is herself a casualty in the wider war for truth that took the life of her friend.
This happened in a newsroom that last year claimed, absurdly, that it was revamping its opinion section to promote “personal liberties,” along with free-market capitalism. That vow has proved every bit as empty as the 2017 Trump-45-era rebrand that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As Trump 47 dawned, Bezos and his tangled web of “free-market capitalism” that somehow depends heavily on government contracts learned to stop worrying and love dictatorship.
In a dizzying year, the former newspaper of my dreams spiked its reasoned endorsement of Kamala Harris on Bezos’ orders, drove off its Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who mocked bended-knee billionaires (including Bezos), and hired an intellectual midget to run the opinion pages that crank out pablum like “Ready for some football” while America burns and our modern Nero fiddles.
The only question is why I have stayed with them for this long. Maybe because I’ve always used my platform to urge folks to support journalism, and a dwindling handful of folks on the Post’s news side still practice it. Or maybe it was childhood nostalgia. But I can’t spare one thin dime to the enablers of this American fascism that I’d hoped to never see in my lifetime. The Attiah firing was the exclamation point. The darkness of dying democracy has fallen on One Franklin Square, and I am out, done, finished.
It’s been painful for me to get here, and I want to make one thing clear. I’m giving up on the Post and its oligarch owner, but not on the power of journalism to make the world a better place. I am urging everyone who still subscribes to cancel the Post, but also reinvest those dollars in the scores of independent journalists and rebel sites that still stand up to autocracy. Please start by supporting Attiah herself, because we need to amplify her voice more loudly than ever.
If this column sounds slightly familiar to regular readers, it’s because earlier this summer I shared a very similar personal story about another landmark of my 1970s formative years: my alma mater Brown University, which signed a deal that too much capitulated to the Trump regime’s extortion. I once respected many institutions, and revered a few like the Post and Brown, because they seemed to embody an American dream of expanding freedom. Then they folded like a chintzy house of cards.
The Washington Post is dead to me. Was I dreaming, too, in 1976 when I thought I saw Bradlee, in the persona of actor Jason Robards, as he stood out in the 2 a.m. pitch-blackness of his front yard and laid out the stakes, that “nothing is riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press, and quite possibly, the future of the country”?
Because it’s all fading to black.
Yo, do this!
Ask me anything
Question: Are you scared? (’Cause we are.) — @riggsvida.bsky,social via Bluesky
Answer: I can’t lie. I am scared. That’s why I chose to answer your question despite a slew of other good ones around Russia/China diplomacy, farm policy, and other important but more narrow topics. The early response to Charlie Kirk’s murder from the Trump regime suggests what many of us who believe in democracy have long feared: an event similar to 1933’s Reichstag fire in Germany that could be used to crush dissent, ruin the lives of liberal critics, and consolidate dictatorial powers. What’s unclear right now is whether the ugliness of the past few days — using the assassination to silence journalists, academics and others — is the worst of it (which is pretty bad), or whether Trump and JD Vance are serious about harnessing the power of the state to prosecute or destroy left-leaning groups and their leaders. Let’s start by calling either scenario what it is: full-on fascism. We’re seeing in real time that it can happen here.
What you’re saying about…
The Charlie Kirk assassination overshadowed everything else last week, including any hope for robust reader response about Supreme Court reform. The hardy few who did weigh in tended to like radical changes such as expanding the court but also questioned whether Dems had the gumption, let alone the votes, to implement any. The low-hanging fruit of an ethics code was popular. Wrote David Pasicznyk: “Have them follow the same ethics rule as any other Government worker — like the guy that fixes potholes — and have them disciplined or removed for violations.” Carol-Ann Dearnaley wondered if we should impose a “cut-off age of 70 or 20 years, whichever comes first.”
📮 This week’s question: In light of my above rant about the Washington Post, I’m wondering what news sources you would still recommend to others as essential reading, viewing, or listening to stay informed in the Trump era. Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “My news sources” in the subject line.
Backstory on the Democrat who’s doing it right
There are 100 U.S. senators, and I’d bet that 97 of them think of themselves as a possible, if not likely, 48th president of the United States. That said, there are a few who actually focus on the work at hand rather than going on five different Sunday TV shows, and whose names even political junkies struggle to remember. I would have put Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen — globetrotting kid of diplomat/CIA parents, 1982 grad of Swarthmore College in Delco, lifelong political staffer and elected official, with a shock of wavy gray hair straight out of Capitol Hill central casting — in this bland, workaday category.
Until this year.
In hindsight, we should have noticed Van Hollen — former House insider who grabbed an open Senate seat in heavily blue Maryland in 2016 — sooner. He was quicker than most to grasp the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump, calling the 45th president “a political arsonist” after the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted coup at the Capitol, and suggesting that the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove him immediately from office. He’s also been consistently ahead of his Democratic colleagues in his willingness to criticize the Israeli government for its conduct in Gaza, finally accusing the Netanyahu government of “ethnic cleansing” after a trip to the region with a colleague, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.
But Van Hollen’s real profiles-in-courage moment came this spring after a Maryland resident, the undocumented Salvadoran immigrant and union laborer, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was snatched by ICE agents and — mistakenly, a soon-to-be-fired government lawyer conceded — deported to a notorious gulag in his native country. Against the advice of some craven Democratic colleagues and knowing he’d be subject of abuse by the Trump regime, Van Hollen flew to El Savador and demanded and got to meet with Abrego Garcia, who was moved to a better prison. “If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America,” Van Hollen said in defending the trip. His effort kept a spotlight on Abrego Garcia — now returned to the U.S. but still fighting deportation — as voters have steadily turned against Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Van Hollen’s journey from back-bencher to truth-teller has been remarkable. Last weekend, Van Hollen spoke to Democratic activists in Iowa and issued both an unqualified endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old leftist who won the Democratic primary and is likely to become New York City’s next mayor, and a challenge to New York colleagues who’ve sat on the sidelines. “That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of,” Van Hollen said. “They need to get behind him and get behind him now.” A day later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul published a New York Times op-ed finally endorsing Mamdani.
There are other apparently spineless Democrats who still aren’t getting it. After the Mamdani comments, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklynite who has diffidently refused to back his fellow New Yorker, obnoxiously issued a statement that “confused New Yorkers are asking themselves the question: Chris Van Who?” Seriously? Van Hollen stands out right now as one of few Democrats giving the party’s base what it so desperately wants: someone who’ll tell the truth about Trump’s power grab and isn’t putting his finger up to the fickle winds of overpaid and often clueless political consultants. We could save U.S. democracy if we elected 50 more senators just like Chris Van Who.
What I wrote on this date in 2022
America’s rapid slide into dictatorship — who saw this coming? Um, anyone paying attention? On this date three years ago, I wrote about a provocative essay by a right-wing “thought leader” named John Daniel Davidson that argued it was past time for conservatives to abandon “small government” and use the power of the state to smash liberals. Wrote Davidson: ” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” Read the rest from Sept. 16, 2022: “The right makes an overt case for U.S. fascism.”
Recommended Inquirer reading