“We” Haven’t Lost Our Sense of Shame. Only Republicans Have.

Republicans once lectured the rest of about the absence of shame. In the Epstein era, they’re the shameless ones.

At moments of massive social breakdown, when we are in the process of discovering to our horror that something evil has been going on in our society that much of the elite class was in on and that regular people were not told about—and this is surely such a moment—it’s a first and natural reflex among the people who are paid to ponder these things to ask where “we” went wrong. How can “we” have allowed this? And more importantly, how, knowing what we know today, can “we” be anything less than zealous in our pursuit of the whole truth?

Well, I say, excuse me, but who is this “we”? I’m not part of that “we.” You’re not part of that “we.” That “we” is a very specific “they”: It’s elites who believe they live in some atmospheric level beneath which the law and morality evaporate. With respect to Jeffrey Epstein, this elite, so perfectly dubbed “the Epstein class” by Senator Jon Ossoff, included representatives of both political parties: You had Bill Clinton and Larry Summers along with Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick. We don’t know exactly what these men did and did not do, and we need to be careful about such speculation, even with respect to Trump. But at bottom, they and many others consorted with someone they had to know was evil.

Now, finally, we are in the phase where we’re searching for answers. But again, with that last sentence, the “we” problem arises again. What “we” is searching for answers? That “we” includes me; and, I presume, you; and most of the media; and a sizable majority of the American people; and it includes Ro Khanna and a number of congressional Democrats and one admirable congressional Republican, Thomas Massie.

But by and large, it does not include the people who lead the Republican Party. It does include—credit where it’s due—many rank-and-file conservatives, who kept this issue bubbling on right-wing podcasts and in chat rooms. But it doesn’t include their leaders. In fact, their leaders—following their infallible Dear Leader—are actively blocking the search for answers. So, no—“we” haven’t lost our sense of shame. Trump and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and James Comer and dozens of other Republicans who have the power to dig for answers have lost theirs.

Trump, obviously, wants the issue to go away so badly that he now may even start a war to distract us from anything Epstein-related. Bondi, the most cowardly and corrupt attorney general in modern history (yes, worse than John Mitchell!), presumably knows the truth and obviously doesn’t want it out. Ditto Patel.

And as for Comer, neither he nor any other Republican member of the House Oversight Committee bothered to show up for former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner’s closed-door testimony this week. Comer topped that by telling Sean Hannity Thursday night: “What we have seen from the millions of documents that have been released is that Donald Trump is completely exonerated in the whole Epstein saga.” And although nearly all GOP House members voted for that Epstein transparency act, no one in either the House or the Senate besides Massie has shown the slightest interest in unearthing the facts.

So that’s the “we” here who have no sense of shame. Not us. It’s just Republicans, who obviously are either terrified that there’s something appalling in those files about their president or know it already.

I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture. Newt Gingrich did it, while he was cheating on his second wife. Reagan education secretary and national scold Bill Bennett did it constantly, pumping out bestselling books about how liberalism had destroyed shame through its pernicious celebration of individual difference. Then we learned that the quality of shame completely eluded him every time he walked through the doors of a gambling casino, and that kind of finished him off as an arbiter of social morality.

Today? They’re the ones with no shame. Many have observed, in the wake of the amazing arrest in the U.K. of the sybarite formerly known as Prince (Andrew), that accountability seems to exist everywhere except the United States. Some observers also point to the sentencing this week in South Korea of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose demise Americans would do well to pay attention to.

On December 3, 2024, accusing the opposition party of engaging in “anti-state activities,” Yoon declared martial law. He suspended political activities, including convenings of the national and local legislatures, and he placed restrictions on the press. Fortunately for South Korea, it was all over within days: Yoon was impeached on December 14, arrested the next January 15, and on Thursday he was sentenced to life in prison.

How did South Korea manage to deliver justice so swiftly? Because a number of members of his own party opposed him. On the night Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the National Assembly called an emergency session; a quorum quickly gathered, and the assembly voted to condemn Yoon’s declaration. The vote of 190 members that night was unanimous, and it included 18 members of Yoon’s own party.

Once upon a sweet old time, it was utterly impossible to imagine such a political crisis in the United States. Today? Alas, the only part of the South Korea story that’s hard to imagine in the United States is 18 members of Trump’s Republican Party opposing him.

That’s the “we” that those of us who love this country—in the only meaningful sense, of wanting it to live up to its potential and its highest ideals, including holding everyone equal before the law—need to be wary of. They will always put Trump before country. And certainly before the girls, now women, so viciously violated by Epstein and whatever members of his “class.” Shameful indeed.

The Sickening Image That Will Haunt Pam Bondi the Rest of Her Life

The attorney general’s congressional hearing was so bad, Fox didn’t even cover it. And it may not even have been the worst thing she did this week!

During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.

Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.

It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.

Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.

Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.

And yet, for all this? In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.

Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing—Ticketmaster’s stock is already surging.” That last sentence is true. If you’re interested, you can read here about why this is so bad. The bottom line is that Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.

To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.

It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights. “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.

None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.

Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post

You will lose money. Piles of it. But you will help save something far more important than money.

By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.

I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”

Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.

And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.

So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.

So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.

I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.

And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.

Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do........

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