As Trump's polls slide, it's time to pick a side. There is no middle ground between Recuse and "J'Accuse!"
Courage, honesty and integrity are beginning to turn the tide against greed, brutality and cynicism. But the Second Hundred Days will tell the story.
So now even 60 Minutes, the gold standard of investigative journalism, has fallen victim to the “Brown Plague” of Trumpist fascism1. Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, suddenly resigned this week. Dan Rather and Jake Tapper have helped us to understand both the underlying greed and groveling weakness of Shari Redstone and Paramount Global in the face of Trump’s legal action and implied threats to undermine Paramount’s proposed sale to Skydance Media. Tapper’s commentary is below, and it is scathing.
Dan Rather, who knows a thing or two about 60 Minutes, and also about journalistic integrity and accountability, wrote this in his Substack this week, reporting from sources about why Owens left:
To appease Redstone, CBS brass has imposed a new layer of editorial oversight. Two news executives from inside CBS have been tasked with vetting stories and overseeing content. As one “60 Minutes” staffer pointed out, all of this opens new ways for Redstone — and by extension, Trump — to have their way….
What does this mean for the future of “60 Minutes” and its next executive producer? Will the program’s weekly audience of millions be able to trust a news product that has been vetted not to offend politicians nor hurt a corporate bottom line? Donald Trump is smiling that the questions are even being asked.
Redstone could be the savior of this story, defending “60 Minutes” and the First Amendment … though we’re more likely to see water run uphill. The real hero is Owens, who is standing up for journalistic integrity and independence while suffering the personal consequences.
The world is now divided into two groups. Owens is on one side, and Redstone is on the other.
Owens is certainly a hero for exposing this betrayal of a sacred American institution. So are Rather and Tapper for speaking out about it. On last night’s program, Scott Pelley mustered the courage to attempt to salvage the show’s reputation, which for Redstone, is its prime source of value, so she undoubtedly approved of its airing with enthusiasm. But even that tepid admission would not have taken place had not Rather, Tapper and others exposed the truth and had Owens not fallen on his sword.
Redstone is hardly alone in her greed and cowardly short-sightedness. As Trump himself crowed in his interview for The Atlantic with Ashley Parker and Michael Sherer:
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. …Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Cowardice and greed are contagious, but so is courage. We need more of that courage (Dan Rather’s favorite word and the title of his Substack). Desperately. It is time to choose sides. We can either be on Team Redstone, for Shari represents the capitulators, or Team Zola, for Emile Zola, the French author, who was the very exemplar of a major cultural figure willing to risk everything to stand up to the pinnacles of power.
Zola’s front-page essay, “I Accuse!” published in January, 1898, forced the Franch government and military to defend themselves against his accusations of falsifying evidence in the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, for treason. Dreyfus was later exonerated and Zola was sued for libel and convicted. He fled to England to escape jail, but ultimately came to be seen as a hero in France, and when he died, his remains were buried the Pantheon.
His “J’Accuse” essay has attained a life of its own and has come to be seen as “the most famous front page in the history of journalism” wrote Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe back in 2008, a hundred Trumpist lifetimes ago:
Zola's article mobilized the Dreyfusards, who included many of the era's leading writers, artists, and academics. This too was the birth of something the modern world takes for granted: an intellectual class actively engaged in a war over national culture and values. To the supporters of Dreyfus, the stakes were those of French democracy and justice: individual rights, due process, and equality under the law (italics mine).
Any of that sound familiar? It took someone of Zola’s reputation of integrity to put himself on the line so courageously to bend the arc of history in the direction of justice. And for doing so, Zola was rewarded by prosecution, a self imposed exile, and a death that happened way too soon at age 62 - possibly by murder. 2
Zola died young, but his words achieved immortality. Shari Redstone will go down in history as the woman who got very rich destroying the most respected brand in broadcast journalism. She will not be buried in the Pantheon, but perhaps in some golden “Garden of Suckers and Losers” that Trump constructs for his soul-selling victims that he laughs about.
And now we are looking for new Zolas. A hundred new Zolas for the Second Hundred Days. We need a lot more Zolas than Dreyfus did. And some - many - of them need to be Republican.
Everyone needs know that right now you’re either on Team J’Accuse or Team Recuse, willing to stand up and fight or opting to sit this apocalypse out.
Everyone needs to know this: Journalists, Lawyers, Business Executives, Judges, Clergy, Politicians, University Presidents, Professors and Students, Stockbrokers, Novelists, Law Enforcers, Generals, Diplomats, Politicians, and two-year-olds about to be deported for no reason at all. Everyone.
It’s still not a fair fight, but the battle for democracy is more winnable than it was. The second hundred days will tell the tale. Will it be Lisa “J’Accuse” Murkowski, conquering her fears, or Chuck “J’Accuse” Grassley, accusing Trump of being played as a patsy by Putin. Lindsey Graham? Ehhhh, I don’t think so, but he is beginning to edge back to sanity on Ukraine and Russia, one of the two issues where Trump is most vulnerable (the other being the economy). Who will be our Zola? We’ll need multiple Zolas. One will not be enough. They need to prop one another up. Graham needs a double measure of propping.
As Trump’s presidency crashes and burns, it won’t be the sharks that are circling, but the awakened consciences of newly cleared heads. Dramatic polls can act as a double dose of Claritin-D to the formerly entranced and enfeebled minds of cultists.
But despite Trump’s poll numbers that Rachel Maddow characterized gleefully as “dropping like a cinderblock in the ocean,” this is not the time to be gleeful. We can cheer the impact of the first hundred days of resistance, but we also need to understand that it’s the policies themselves that have caused the poll numbers to fall, and real people are really suffering from those policies. To the degree that activism has helped, it’s for two reasons: 1) it has steeled us for the battles that lie ahead and 2) it has begun to convince fence sitters that it’s OK to get off the fence and that cowardice is not a good look.
Shari, you look pretty awful right now. All that money will not buy back the honor that you and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Columbia and Bezos and Zuckerberg, and El Salvador’s leadership, have willingly and unflinchingly sacrificed. Actually, to call it a “sacrifice” is to presume that the betrayal of truth might have been preceded by a pang of conscience.
The polls are sinking like a sunset at Malibu. It’s a beautiful sight. We need to be grateful for the progress that has been made.
We’ve made courage sexy again.
That’s no mean feat. But the next hundred days need to take that a step farther, far beyond where we’ve been since this Trump nightmare began. We have to make the polling slide contagious, to awaken potentially courageous Republicans. We need to show them that, when it comes to Trump’s job approval, X marks the spot:
Hannah Arendt’s statue is slated to be included in Trump’s vanity project for America’s 250th, the Garden of Heroes (and as an aside, I can only attribute Bill Russell’s absence from this preliminary group to the fact that he wasn’t yet dead when the list was compiled). Evidently, and not surprisingly, Trump has not read Arendt’s books on totalitarianism and Nazis. She wrote the following passage, which we need to take to heart right now.
Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded. Such a man was Zola! (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Neither Arendt nor Emile Zola had the benefit of Quinnipiac, Siena and Pew when she made her bold assertions and when Zola put himself out there to defend Dreyfus and condemn antisemitism in a very antisemitic place. Of course he knew that coming out on the side of a Jew accused of treason was not a popular thing to do. Sort of like defending an immigrant here in America. The Dreyfus trial exposed so much antisemitism that it shocked the sensibilities of a Viennese journalist covering it; from then on, Theodore Herzl worked toward the creation of a state where Jews could live in freedom and peace. He saw how hopeless things were getting in Europe.
We need more people like Marina Ovsyannikova, the woman who protested Putin’s war right on Russian TV. She now lives in exile and lost custody of her daughter. But like Zola’s, her act of courage will never be forgotten.
But now the herd is shifting. The anesthetized are waking up. The sheep are bleating as egg prices climb. The misguided masses have seen the handwriting - and the words of the prophets - literally written on the subway walls:
In his famous front page article (translated here), Zola made clear that his purpose was to provoke a defamation suit so the truth could come out in court. He wrote:
As for the people I accuse, I do not know them, I have never seen them, I have no resentment or hatred against them. They are for me only entities, spirits of social evil. And the act I am doing here is just a revolutionary way to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have only one passion, that of light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and which has the right to happiness. My fiery protest is only the cry of my soul. So dare you put me on trial and let the investigation take place! I wait.
All of us need to take those words to heart. As tempting as it is, we can’t rely on bitter sarcasm or personal attacks to see us through. We shouldn’t try to “Own the Cult.” We need to bring them along and show them the light. All we want is “an explosion of truth and justice.” Zola demonstrated that such a light can inspire others, not like an insidious, contagious disease such as fascism, but as a cleansing fire, a pure cry from the soul.
We need lots of Zolas right now.
Elie Wiesel often told a parable about the man who stood at the entrance of Sodom, crying out against the injustice and evil in that city. A passerby said to him, “For years you have been urging the people to repent, and yet no one has changed. Why do you continue?” He responded: “When I first came, I protested because I hoped to change the people of Sodom. Now I continue to cry out, because if I don’t, they will have changed me.”
Now, with the help of Quinnipiac, Siena and Pew, we can change them.
Albert Camus called fascism “the Brown Plague”in his classic allegory, “The Plague.” It’s less overwpoering but more insidious than the Black Plague, and no less dangerous. The term originated from an exploration of Germany in 1932-33 by another French writer, Daniel Guérin. He wrote that even at that early stage of the German transformation, everyone had already “taken sides,” whether on the side of communism or fascism. He expected communism to be winning and Germany to be on the verge of a revolutio, like Russia before it. He was surprised to discover the pendulum swinging inthe opposite direction.
According to Wikipedia, four years after the letter was published, Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney. On 4 June 1908, Zola's remains were laid to rest in the Panthéon in Paris. In 1953, the newspaper Libération published a death-bed confession by a Parisian roofer that he had murdered Zola by blocking the chimney of his house.
Thank you, Rabbi. Well-argued, passionate, and clear. The question of Which side are you on? is one that not everyone will want to be asked, nor answer, but one which it’s important to keep asking. Silence, which we’re taught may be appropriate when addressing grief, is never correct when facing injustice.