On Monday morning, Donald Trump tried to do what he has done many times before: rewrite history in an attempt to make himself look like a man of moderation.

This time it concerned Trump’s treatment of the media, which has included a long history of threats and denigration. “In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press,” Trump told Fox News Digital. Those remarks, at least to anyone who has paid attention over the past decade, starkly diverged from his record of attacking American journalists, which just two weeks ago saw the president-elect saying that he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot at.

Trump also told the outlet that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press,” adding, “If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

These claims are confounding—in fact, rendered useless—when you consider the lengths the president-elect has gone to to attack journalists who produce coverage that is critical of him. On the weekend before Election Day, Trump told Fox News, “To make America great, you really do have to get the news shaped up,” and called reporters present at a rally later that day “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people,” as my colleague Dan Friedman reported at the time.

Between September and November, Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the media more than 100 times, according to an analysis conducted by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

So what prompted Trump’s apparent about-face on the media? It comes on the heels of a meeting Trump reportedly had on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the husband-and-wife hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. For context, Trump and the hosts go way back; Scarborough, a former Florida congressman, reportedly gave Trump advice during his first presidential campaign, and the ex-president would call into the influential morning show to discuss politics and policy. But their relationship soured as Trump’s popularity grew, the hosts became more critical of his policies, and Trump launched a baseless personal attack against Brzezinski that earned him rebukes from even within his own party.

But after Scarborough and Brzezinski on Monday announced that the trio had met for the first time in seven years, Trump appears to have softened his view on the media at large.

“We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarborough said on-air Monday, adding, “We talked about that a good bit. It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show….that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”

Joe and Mika went to Mar a Lago to talk with Trump over the weekend. First face-to-face meeting in seven years. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so," @JoeNBC says. "What we did agree on – was to restart communications," @morningmika says. pic.twitter.com/lyWZWK4CwX

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 18, 2024

Trump also discussed the meeting with Fox News Digital, describing it as “extremely cordial,” adding that they discussed some of his Cabinet picks. “The meeting ended in a very positive manner,” he reportedly said, “and we agreed to speak in the future.” 

Brzezinski’s take—that it’s worth talking to Trump for those who have access—has some merit: After all, more than 76 million Americans voted for him. But then again, mainstream journalists have tried. Trump repeatedly rebuffed sit-down interview invitations during the campaign from CBS News and NBC News, both of which Harris did do; Instead, Trump gave interviews to a bevy of right-wing male podcasters. If Trump and his team are serious about respecting the press, they will have to engage with them—respectfully, and on the issues—rather than denigrate them.

They could start with us: Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a list of questions from Mother Jones, including about whether Trump would apologize for saying he’d be ok with journalists being shot at; whether he’d commit to stop calling journalists “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; whether the newly named press secretary Karoline Leavitt would commit to holding regular news briefings at the White House, unlike during his first term; and what specific steps Trump would take to improve his relationship with the news media.

It’s ultimately unclear if Trump’s sudden friendliness toward the media can be attributed to the MSNBC reunion at Mar-a-Lago. But one thing remains certain: You probably can’t trust this one, at all.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump tried to do what he has done many times before: rewrite history in an attempt to make himself look like a man of moderation.

This time it concerned Trump’s treatment of the media, which has included a long history of threats and denigration. “In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press,” Trump told Fox News Digital. Those remarks, at least to anyone who has paid attention over the past decade, starkly diverged from his record of attacking American journalists, which just two weeks ago saw the president-elect saying that he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot at.

Trump also told the outlet that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press,” adding, “If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

These claims are confounding—in fact, rendered useless—when you consider the lengths the president-elect has gone to to attack journalists who produce coverage that is critical of him. On the weekend before Election Day, Trump told Fox News, “To make America great, you really do have to get the news shaped up,” and called reporters present at a rally later that day “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people,” as my colleague Dan Friedman reported at the time.

Between September and November, Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the media more than 100 times, according to an analysis conducted by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

So what prompted Trump’s apparent about-face on the media? It comes on the heels of a meeting Trump reportedly had on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the husband-and-wife hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. For context, Trump and the hosts go way back; Scarborough, a former Florida congressman, reportedly gave Trump advice during his first presidential campaign, and the ex-president would call into the influential morning show to discuss politics and policy. But their relationship soured as Trump’s popularity grew, the hosts became more critical of his policies, and Trump launched a baseless personal attack against Brzezinski that earned him rebukes from even within his own party.

But after Scarborough and Brzezinski on Monday announced that the trio had met for the first time in seven years, Trump appears to have softened his view on the media at large.

“We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarborough said on-air Monday, adding, “We talked about that a good bit. It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show….that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”

Joe and Mika went to Mar a Lago to talk with Trump over the weekend. First face-to-face meeting in seven years. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so," @JoeNBC says. "What we did agree on – was to restart communications," @morningmika says. pic.twitter.com/lyWZWK4CwX

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 18, 2024

Trump also discussed the meeting with Fox News Digital, describing it as “extremely cordial,” adding that they discussed some of his Cabinet picks. “The meeting ended in a very positive manner,” he reportedly said, “and we agreed to speak in the future.” 

Brzezinski’s take—that it’s worth talking to Trump for those who have access—has some merit: After all, more than 76 million Americans voted for him. But then again, mainstream journalists have tried. Trump repeatedly rebuffed sit-down interview invitations during the campaign from CBS News and NBC News, both of which Harris did do; Instead, Trump gave interviews to a bevy of right-wing male podcasters. If Trump and his team are serious about respecting the press, they will have to engage with them—respectfully, and on the issues—rather than denigrate them.

They could start with us: Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a list of questions from Mother Jones, including about whether Trump would apologize for saying he’d be ok with journalists being shot at; whether he’d commit to stop calling journalists “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; whether the newly named press secretary Karoline Leavitt would commit to holding regular news briefings at the White House, unlike during his first term; and what specific steps Trump would take to improve his relationship with the news media.

It’s ultimately unclear if Trump’s sudden friendliness toward the media can be attributed to the MSNBC reunion at Mar-a-Lago. But one thing remains certain: You probably can’t trust this one, at all.

Fox News Media wants to take some of its fans to church. To promote “The Saints,” a new eight-part documentary series executive produced by Martin Scorsese for the Fox Nation streaming outlet, the Fox Corp.-backed conservative media organization has opened an interactive kiosk outside its New York headquarters that looks like something akin to a […]

Moonbug, the family content machine behind the Netflix juggernaut “Cocomelon,” has enacted a small round of layoffs. Sources estimated that less than 5% of the company will be impacted, and that pink slips will come for roles in Los Angeles and London. Another source said the brunt of downsizing will hit in-house writers for series […]

John Malone is making big changes to his media and broadband holdings — including the departure of right-hand man Greg Maffei. Liberty Media announced that President and Chief Executive Officer Greg Maffei, will be stepping down from his role at the end of 2024. Liberty Media’s Chairman, John Malone, will assume the role of interim […]

Billionaire investor Mario Gabelli still has not decided whether he’ll mount a legal challenge to Skydance Media’s merger with Paramount Global. Gabelli is the founder, chairman and CEO of GAMCO Investors, which represents clients who own about 12.5% of the Class A voting shares of Paramount Global. That makes the firm and its clients the […]

John Malone sees M&A activity in media stepping up in a significant way now that regime change is coming in Washington, D.C. The renowed investor and chairman of Liberty Media took part in a wide-ranging Q&A Tuesday morning to kick off the Paley Center for Media’s annual International Council Summit held at Paley Center’s New […]

Press freedom groups have a stark warning for Americans: Trump could pose a serious threat to fact-based journalism during his next term in office if he does not change course.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom of the Press Foundation all issued statements in the aftermath of Trump’s win this week, urging the ex- and soon-to-be president and his administration to commit to respecting the free press during the next four years. “Attacking the press is really an attack on American citizens’ right to know,” Reporters Without Borders Executive Director Clayton Weimers said in a statement. “Trump’s new administration can and must change its tune with the media and take concrete steps to protect journalists and develop a climate conducive to a robust and pluralistic news media.”

This will be a tall order for Trump: At a rally just last weekend, he said he would be OK with a crowd of journalists being shot at, as I reported at the time. His communications director, Steven Cheung, tried to clean up his comments by implausibly alleging that Trump “was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!” From early September until the end of October, Trump verbally attacked the media more than 100 times, Reporters Without Borders found in an analysis published last month. Trump has repeatedly derided journalists as “fake news” and the media as “the enemy of the people.” And as my colleague Pema Levy reported, Trump also launched what experts said was a frivolous lawsuit against CBS News last month, alleging that producers unfairly edited a 60 Minutes interview with his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to make her look better. His campaign also submitted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission claiming that the Washington Post was running a paid advertising campaign to boost stories critical of Trump; a Post spokesperson said the allegations were “improper” and “without merit.” CNN also reported that Trump has called at least 15 times for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks he dislikes.

All this makes it no wonder, then, that Reporters Without Borders said Trump’s reelection “marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists struck a similar tone. “Legal persecution, imprisonment, physical violence, and even killings have sadly become familiar threats for journalists across the world,” its statement said. “They must not now also become commonplace in the United States, where threats of violence and online harassment have in recent years become routine.” And Freedom of the Press Foundation claimed that Trump “will try to destroy press freedom”; as the group noted, Trump will have an ally in Elon Musk, who has spread pro-Trump disinformation on his platform to the tune of billions of views in the lead-up to Election Day. More recently, Musk has taken to telling everyday X users that they are the media now and “citizen journalism is the future.” (Apparently his conception of journalism sees conspiracy theories as acceptable and fact-checks as unnecessary.)

This all comes at a time when Republicans, and young people, are as likely to trust social media as a news source as they are to trust national news outlets, according to data published last month from Pew Research Center. The Trump campaign and the GOP have both contributed to and capitalized on this distrust, with Trump launching his own social media network, Truth Social, in 2022, and eschewing the cable news sit-downs Harris did during the campaign for interviews with right-wing male podcasters, who likely helped him make massive gains among young men this year. Media outlets hoping to win back the trust of these voters, though, will not just have podcasters and social media to compete with: One of their biggest adversaries will likely be Trump himself.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Sunday.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “Election Integrity Community” have turned their attention from stoking paranoia about voter fraud in the presidential race, now that Trump won, to alleging it in Arizona, where a closely watched Senate race looks like it could result in a GOP loss.

As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.

One of the main mysteries among members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one user claimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.

Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”

This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “Election Integrity Community” have turned their attention from stoking paranoia about voter fraud in the presidential race, now that Trump won, to alleging it in Arizona, where a closely watched Senate race looks like it could result in a GOP loss.

As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.

One of the main mysteries among members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one user claimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.

Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”

This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

Paramount Global added 3.5 million new Paramount+ subscribers in its third quarter, but those gains failed to offset meaningful declines in its larger TV and film businesses. The owner of the CBS broadcast network, the Paramount movie studio and cable networks Comedy Central said third-quarter revenue fell 6% to $6.73 billion from $7.13 billion in […]

As the sun set over the New York Times building on election night, the Times Tech Guild—the union of workers that power the infrastructure for the company’s news, games, and cooking—closed out their second day on the picket line. Their strike, an attempt to push for a deal they’ve negotiated for over two years, might bring down tonight one of America’s most beloved and beloathed election-night prognosticators: the Needle. 

As reporter and polls expert Nate Cohn explained on X, the tech team “built and maintain the infrastructure that feeds [the Needle] data and lets [the Times] publish [it] on the internet.” As of the time of publication, the Needle is up. But it’s unclear if without the guild’s work it will last.

The Tech Guild wants pay equity, remote work protections, and—top of many minds on Tuesday night—protection from being arbitrarily fired, known as “just cause.”

The 173-year-old Times has over the past several years transformed into something more like a tech company with the news as a key, but not singular, component. Its games and cooking apps drive subscriptions; it has expanded into audio and sports. With that transformation has come a change in how workers organize at the company. Now, alongside their newspaper and advertising workers’ unions, the paper hosts one of the largest tech unions in the country. 

Kathy Zhang, unit chair for the New York Times Tech Guild, has had “probably hundreds of conversations” with her fellow workers leading up to this moment. I asked her about the picket line, the Needle, and why workers are striking.

What would you normally be doing on election day if you weren’t on the picket line? 

I am a senior analytics manager on the audience team at the New York Times, which means that I pull data around traffic trends, and I look at how people are listening to audio and engaging with our coverage.

This will be my third presidential election here. I’ve been at the Times for nine years. In 2017, on January 20th, inauguration day, I was the person who stayed up past 1 a.m. waiting for our data to come through to let our editors know what election traffic looked like. Election day is one day, but election season is a long time, and we spend a long time prepping for it. It’s unfortunate the management let it drag out this far. 

I know you all have been saying this could happen for some time, right? 

We have been bargaining for almost two and a half years. We started bargaining in July of 2022. It was September 10 when we passed a strike authorization vote with 95 percent support. We told management the very next day, we gave them two months in advance. We were in bargaining all last week, but on Sunday night, management decided to walk away from the table. So the ball is literally in their court. 

Online, I’ve seen right-wing media focusing in on some unusual concerns they claim you’re bargaining over stuff, like pet bereavement leave, trigger warnings on political topics, that kind of thing. 

The most important issues that are unresolved right now are just cause—meaning that we can’t be fired for no reason whatsoever—and flexible work, so that people who have caretaking responsibilities or live hundreds of miles away aren’t forced to come into the office. We’re a unit in which, you know, our members see a lot of inequity in how we’re paid. We want to be paid fairly. 

Management, instead of talking about the actual issues at play, has been seeding talking points to right-wing media. It’s actually pretty depressing coming from a newspaper that’s supposed to care about independent journalism; they’re putting misleading talking points out there. 

I saw a clip on Fox News that said we were looking for job security for illegals. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the visas and immigration proposals that we have on the table. I don’t know what job security for illegals means, because it’s literally about people with visas, right? We care about people getting notice about whether they’re going to get their visas sponsored. 

I myself am an immigrant, I am a naturalized citizen, and I care about democracy—that’s why I’m out here in a union! It was a complete mischaracterization of our proposal. It brought up stuff that was maybe on the table two years ago, for maybe seven minutes, and hasn’t been talked about since. I think it’s really telling that the company would rather talk about things they think make us look like we are being unreasonable, rather than talk about the fact that this company has authorized $400 million in stock buybacks, which is money that goes directly into shareholders’ pockets, not to workers. 

It doesn’t do anything other than make rich people richer, and they’d rather threaten election night coverage than come to a fair deal with their workers. 

If this continues, how is the strike going to affect coverage during and beyond election night? 

There are so many interconnected systems that power what we work on, I couldn’t even tell you all the things that could go wrong or could maybe not go wrong. And there are systems that readers aren’t gonna see that will cause a lot of problems for us. 

But we have a lot of support from our colleagues in the newsroom and in advertising. They’ve written letters to management telling them that they need us. Our newsroom colleagues are the people who supplied our lunch today—some of them are on the picket line right now in their free time before their shift starts or after they’ve already worked a whole day.

This is the biggest tech-worker strike that I’m aware of in American history. What makes you all different from other tech unions? What’s helped you get this far?  

We are the largest “high-tech” union in the country with bargaining rights, but we had a lot of support and solidarity from other tech workers who have been unionized.

I think part of it is, that the New York Times is a newspaper company, but what other newspaper has six or seven hundred tech workers in the company? Sometimes, power comes down to the sheer number of people that you have. We have hundreds of people, and that’s hard to organize! But it also means that when people are standing together in solidarity, when we are out here fighting, we know that we can get through this. 

So, right now we’re fighting to make sure that we have more pay equity. We’re fighting to make sure that people just don’t get fired for no reason. That’s really all we’re fighting for. 

One of the most amazing things that I’ve seen is people that I knew voted against unionization and voted against the strike authorization vote, are on the picket line today. Because when it comes down to it, which side are you on, right?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s no surprise, but Shari Redstone will officially part ways with Paramount Global for good once the media conglom’s deal with Skydance Media closes in 2025. Redstone will exit the Paramount board after Skydance and RedBird Capital Partners complete the two-part transaction to acquire Redstone’s National Amusements Inc. and then merge Skydance and Paramount, Variety […]

I was doom-scrolling on X a few months ago when a video about Oakland, California, caught my eye: “Do you know your recaller?” it asked, before an image of a talking white-haired man with a yellow tie flashed across the screen. “Let’s find out.” 

I’d been curious about the recalls in Oakland for a while: Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color, face elections that could drive them out of office. Though their critics have come at them for many reasons, from allegations of nepotism and mismanagement to an FBI raid on Thao’s home, these recall campaigns have largely been driven by community concerns about crime: In Oakland, as in much of the country, many people don’t feel safe right now, even if the data shows that violence dropped significantly this year. I’d already spoken with some of the city’s recall leaders, many of whom are also people of color, hoping to understand why. But I had never seen the man with the yellow tie before. He worked in PR.  

Republicans and moderate Democrats are using crime fears to whip up support for their causes, even as extreme pandemic-era spikes in violence fade.

“Sam Singer is the predator’s press man, the bad guy’s good guy,” the video’s anonymous narrator told me, listing a few of Singer’s achievements in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in crisis communications. After a Chevron refinery caught fire in Richmond and its noxious fumes sent thousands of people to the emergency room, the oil company hired him to manage its reputational damage. The San Francisco Zoo did the same after a tiger jumped out of its cage and killed a teenager. And in 2019, Singer did PR for the house-flipping company Wedgewood during its standoff with a group of formerly unhoused Black moms squatting with their children in one of the company’s vacant Oakland homes. 

Journalists have described Singer as “the master of disaster” and “one of the most influential behind-the-scenes shapers of public opinion in the Bay Area.” He’s repped Facebook, Jack in the Box, and the 49ers, among others. These days, Singer does PR for the Oakland police union; he has said repeatedly that he does not work for the recall campaigns, but he tweets daily about crime in the city and his belief that Thao and Price should be removed from office, and he has a lot of sway with reporters. The video on X struck a conspiratorial note, questioning whether moneyed interests had hired Singer this election season to create “a negative perception of Oakland in the press,” which could help the recalls. Is someone “paying this high-priced spin doctor,” it added, “to talk shit about Oakland?” 

Intrigued, I called up some progressives in the city to see what they had to say about Singer. “He came out of nowhere to start attacking me” on social media, DA Price told me, adding that she had heard he was a “hired gun.”

“He’s a central figure in a larger network who are working together to ensure that a certain group of people remains in power,” said Leigh Hanson, chief of staff for Mayor Thao.

“When it comes to the messaging behind the recalls, he is the person,” added Chaney Turner, a delegate for the California Democratic Party.

He’s “using doom-loop narratives to manipulate pain, fear, and trauma, to push a right-wing agenda,” said Cat Brooks, who leads the nonprofit Anti Police-Terror Project.

“He is a spin doctor in the realest sense of the word,” said Tur-Ha Ak, another co-founder of that group. 

 “The mouthpiece,” said civil rights lawyer Walter Riley.

 “The architect,” said City Councilmember Carroll Fife.

They could not offer any proof that Singer is connected with the recall campaigns; the leaders of the recall committees say flatly that he is not working for them. And in any case, even if Singer is the doom-loop mouthpiece that the city’s progressives suspect, he certainly is not acting alone. In Oakland and around the country, there is no shortage of people retailing in bad vibes: Republicans and moderate Democrats are using crime fears to whip up support for their causes, even as extreme pandemic-era spikes in violence—like the one experienced in Oakland—fade. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped,” Donald Trump said at a campaign event, though FBI data showed that US murders fell at the fastest pace ever recorded last year and were still falling in 2024. 

None of this is new: Inflated crime rhetoric can benefit lots of people; politicians get votes, police get funding, journalists get clicks. It’s been so consistent over the decades that some academics don’t even define “crime waves” as an actual increase in crime—they define it as an increase in public fear of crime, or public attention to it. “There is essentially no relationship between the patterns of crime coverage you see in the press and the amount of crime in the streets. They’re not related,” said Vincent Sacco, a sociologist in Canada who wrote the book When Crime Waves. Nationally, “we’re at essentially a 50-year-low on crime,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, who leads the Prosecutors Alliance of California. “And everybody is like, ‘Crime has never been worse!’ The media is a huge part of why people feel that way.”  

A day after the X video came out, Singer retweeted it. “We’re going to use this as a promotional video,” he wrote. But when I reached out to him for an interview, he demurred: “I don’t work for either of the recall campaigns…so I am not the right person to speak with about them,” he replied. Journalists told me that Singer is an easy guy to talk with, that he’d been profiled numerous times in the past. But for once, the PR professional did not want to talk. Singer is just “like every other neighbor you see out there tweeting about the recall,” said Seneca Scott, who leads the campaign against Thao. He added that Singer was doing it in his capacity as a “private citizen,” though Singer, unlike other citizens, also works for the Oakland police union, a client that badly wants Thao to step down. He “has nothing to do with the recall,” said Brenda Grisham, who leads the campaign against Price. “I’m not cool with people giving other people credit for the blood and sweat I’ve put into this.”  

In the days surrounding my interview request, Singer tweeted constantly about these elections. “Crime is up in Oakland, no question,” he told me in an email, linking to a story about several shootings. He also sent me a press release about a recall campaign ad.

As I dug around, I heard from people who wanted me to write about Singer but worried about speaking on the record. Someone even sent me an anonymous email, linking to information about how Singer influences the media, but they didn’t want to be identified because they interact with him professionally. Progressives complain that the recallers have been less than forthright about the powerful white people funding and otherwise supporting them. “Folks need to understand who’s behind it because they have created this façade,” Ak said. “They put Black people in front of this, and they’re not identifying who’s behind it.” (Scott and Grisham are Black; Singer is white, as are some of the recalls’ biggest funders.) Ak went on: “Without the Sam Singers, these folks would be impotent, they wouldn’t really mean much…The only reason they get any traction is because the Sam Singers amplify their message. The Sam Singers are helping them to get media.” 

Both Thao and Price are unhappy with the news coverage. Reporters at local, national, and even international outlets have written critically about their leadership, and the San Francisco Chronicle recently endorsed their recalls. Progressives continue to suspect that Singer is working behind the scenes to help shape how people in the city think about crime. “We the people want to know,” said Pecolia Manigo, who leads the social justice collaborative Oakland Rising, “how do you get as much media coverage as you get? Let’s see your receipts.”

Margaret Singer was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied the psychology of cults. After the Korean War in the 1950s, she counseled brainwashed prisoners of war. Then she was called to testify in the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst, who after her abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army joined the group in robbing a San Francisco bank. Singer interviewed thousands of former and current cult members during her career, from survivors of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple to members of the Branch Davidians after the deadly Waco siege. “Under the right circumstances we all can be manipulated,” she once said. 

Her son, Sam, born in 1957, became fascinated by the news industry, he explained in a Facebook post, partly because of all the reporters who used to call to talk with his mom. At Berkeley High, Sam edited the paper and enjoyed the job’s competitive nature: He’d often run to the city’s Daily Gazette to “show them that I had beaten them on stories at the school board from the night before,” he told the trade magazine PR Week. Straight out of high school, the Gazette hired him as a copy boy, then as a reporter six months later. His editor Harvey Myman was impressed by his ability to listen—a skill that Sam seemed to have picked up while watching Margaret’s therapy sessions at their kitchen table. “He gets it from his mother,” Myman told the Richmond Confidential, which profiled Singer in 2014. “Sam has always been a very keen observer and understands people very well.” After grad school at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Singer returned to Berkeley when he was 26 and took over the Gazette as editor before it folded about a month later. 

“Under the right circumstances we all can be manipulated,” Margaret Singer once said.  

Soon, Singer pivoted to politics and PR. As press secretary to Nevada Gov. Richard Bryan during Bryan’s run for Senate, he realized he had a knack for talking with reporters. “If you can understand the news business from one side, you can understand it from the other,” he told PR Week. He opened a PR company alongside Larry Kamer, whom he met during a political campaign in California, and eventually started his own shop, Singer Associates, representing not just politicians but also corporations, government agencies, and anyone in need of crisis management. Over the years, that’s included the likes of Nike, Walmart, Bank of America, Williams-Sonoma, Sony, Levi Strauss & Co., Marriott Hotels, San Francisco International Airport, 24 Hour Fitness, and the Salvation Army, among many others. He was a spokesperson for the Bohemian Club, an exclusive fraternity that’s been rumored over the years to include some of the world’s most powerful people, from William Randolph Hearst to the Koch brothers and both President Bushes. When something blows up, you better call Sam Singer: “It’s almost a cliché in our world,” a longtime city politico told SF Weekly. (Singer’s son James is a spokesperson for Kamala Harris.)

Singer’s success, journalists have written, stems from his close relationships with reporters and columnists at major news outlets, including the Chronicle (another former client). “Sam understands what news is and how his clients’ needs and objectives fit into the definition of news,” PR strategist Chuck Finnie told the Richmond Confidential. After the Chevron fire, Singer even started a newspaper with Chevron funding. The Richmond Standard, as it’s called, still covers the city’s news with a smattering of positive stories about Chevron. 

Singer’s success also stems from his keen ability to “turn his client into a sympathetic victim while vilifying his opponents,” then-editor Robert Gammon wrote for Alameda Magazine. After a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo jumped over a wall that was four feet lower than recommended, killing a 17-year-old-old named Carlos Sousa Jr. and injuring two of his friends, Singer urged the zoo to put up signs warning future visitors not to tease the animals. “We knew journalists would ask if they taunted the animals,” he said of the teens. “And we’d say, ‘We don’t know, but we have enough information that we believe it was a possibility.’” The New York Post soon wrote that the friends carried slingshots at the time of the mauling, citing an anonymous source, and that an empty vodka bottle was found in their car. The friends sued following other press coverage, accusing Singer of libel and slander, and the zoo settled, but the damage had already been done: “San Franciscans seemed to be more put out over the shooting of a rare and beautiful animal,” SF Weekly wrote, than they were about the teens it had mauled.

The habits of mainstream journalism are easily exploited by people who know the business. Even here, I am practically compelled by conventions of balance to note that Sousa’s father told police that one of the injured teens admitted to him that he had been drunk and that he had yelled and waved at the animal. This information does important work, once introduced. The straightforward story of an institutional and regulatory failure—a zoo failing to implement recommended safety measures—becomes a melodrama about individuals behaving badly.   

 Speaking to SF Weekly‘s Joe Eskenazi, Singer bragged that getting journalists to use his narrative framing, and sometimes even his exact words, “is a rush that’s similar to sex and drugs and music.” Eskenazi wrote that it was “jarring” to hear such a boast from the son of a brainwashing expert; Singer pointed out that he used his mom’s lessons with good intentions, to help readers hear a different side of the story that they might not have considered. “I love my job,” Singer told the Richmond Confidential. “It’s like being an elected official without campaigning.” Some people who know Singer say he doesn’t lie, that he presents the truth as his clients see it, and that he appears to genuinely believe them. “Sam is extremely energetic and optimistic and always willing to believe the best of everyone,” a fellow consultant told Eskenazi.

“I love my job,” Singer told the Richmond Confidential. “It’s like being an elected official without campaigning.”

But that consultant added that Singer would still “throw a punch,” and that he’s the guy to hire when you want a fight. Case in point: Former business partner Larry Kamer remembers when he got a late-night call during a disagreement with Singer: “Larry, every time you start a fire for me, I’m gonna piss on it and put it out,” Singer said angrily before hanging up. The next morning, Kamer found a big wet spot on the beige carpet in their office—he had it removed, and rumors spread about Singer’s cutthroat tactics. It wasn’t until years later, when talking with Eskenazi, that Singer let everyone in on a little secret: “Decorum” would not allow him to urinate on a rug that he co-owned, he said, but it didn’t stop him from spilling a bottle of Heineken on it and letting everyone think what they thought. “This goes to my belief,” he said, a wide smile across his face, “that a good mindfuck is as good as the real thing.”

In recent years, Singer has shifted his focus to Oakland. Lately, he tweets almost daily about his disgust for the city’s progressive leaders. Speculating about why he has taken such an interest in Oakland has become a sort of dark parlor game among his antagonists.

City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whom Singer critiques often, believes he “has a bone to pick” after the Moms 4 Housing standoff in 2019, which she helped orchestrate with the squatting moms. At the time, Singer referred to them as “bullies” and “thieves,” and the real estate company he repped had them arrested and removed from the property in a predawn raid. 

But the moms won in the realm of publicity: News outlets nationally wrote about their movement for affordable housing. Gov. Gavin Newsom helped negotiate a deal for a community land trust to buy the property, which became known as “Mom’s House,” and it was turned into a transitional home for homeless mothers. California lawmakers enacted reforms. “I think it was embarrassing for him,” said activist Nicole Deane, who worked with Fife. “He’s a professional who’s been doing this for decades,” added Fife, and he got beat by a group of Black women he’d described as criminals. “That can’t be a good feeling.” 

Another theory is that Singer’s ties to the police turned his attention to Oakland. In 2020, Singer repped Anne Kirkpatrick after she was fired as the city’s police chief; she wound up prevailing in her wrongful termination lawsuit. In 2023, he also repped Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong while a federal monitor investigated Armstrong’s handling of a misconduct case. “He has a great reputation—he works hard for his clients,” Armstrong told me recently. With Singer at his side, Armstrong held a rally after newly elected Mayor Thao put him on administrative leave, and he accused the federal monitor of corruption. (A federal monitor has overseen Oakland’s police department for more than two decades to implement reforms that were mandated after a police brutality scandal.)

“I was surprised at the immediately aggressive tone that was taken in the public space,” said Hanson, chief of staff for Thao. Thao fired Armstrong the next month. Nothing else came of Armstrong’s accusation against the monitor.

Not long after that, efforts began to recall Thao and newly elected DA Price, who was also implementing reforms to roll back mass incarceration and hold police accountable. They weren’t the first progressive leaders to face backlash in Oakland: Mayor Jean Quan overcame a recall effort in 2012. Critics blamed them for high crime rates and business closures; Oakland, like many cities, saw a massive spike in shootings in 2020, before Thao or Price were elected; criminologists nationally connected the violence with the pandemic, and killings continued to climb after Thao and Price got to office—from 78 homicides in Oakland in 2019 to 126 homicides in 2023. Thao also faced attacks for Oakland’s budget problems. 

But more than anything, these recalls were fueled by “the image of Oakland,” said political scientist Robert Stanley Oden, author of From Blacks to Brown and Beyond: The Struggle for Progressive Politics in Oakland. “The image of Oakland that lost three professional sports teams,” he continued, referring to the Warriors, the Raiders, and the A’s. And “the image of Oakland where you have crime occurring and an intractable homeless problem—people connect those two issues.” For decades before the pandemic, crime disproportionately affected low-income communities in Oakland’s flatlands, but now richer neighborhoods were seeing instability too. “The people who are being hurt the most by our failed policies are the poor,” said Scott, who leads the mayoral recall campaign. “And now most of the affluent want her gone, too.” A wealthy critic of Price, who asked not to be named, told me earlier this year that he’d dealt with two attempted break-ins at his house recently; his friend a block over was held at gunpoint. “For the first 30 years I lived here, it didn’t feel that way. I never had it in the neighborhood, in front of the house,” he said. “People are legitimately concerned.” 

Journalist Ali Winston has pointed out that many landlords also oppose Thao because she helped enact an eviction moratorium while she was on the city council. This “set the wheels in motion for Thao’s recall virtually from her first days in office,” Winston wrote in August. 

Thao and Price have framed the recalls as undemocratic movements led by real estate and hedge-fund investors. “This is nothing more than a power grab,” Price said in February. The recall campaigns have been mostly bankrolled by a single investor, Philip Dreyfuss, a hedge fund executive who lives in Piedmont, but the campaigns’ leaders dispute that their movement is undemocratic or right wing. Grisham, who heads the campaign against Price, says she’s organizing around grassroots frustrations with violence: She lost her 17-year-old son in a shooting outside their East Oakland home in 2010 as they were heading out to grab dinner at Burger King. I spoke with other mothers supporting the Price recall who are also grieving murdered children.

Singer has taken a hand in these elections, even if he’s not formally working for either campaign. His firm has donated $2,500 to the mayoral recall. And he is the spokesperson for the Oakland Police Officers’ Association, which held a press conference in August calling on Thao to resign because of rising crime. (Murders are down 33 percent in Oakland compared with last year, and violent crime is down 19 percent, according to the latest data.) “Every day you are in office, Oakland is less safe,” the association wrote to the mayor in a letter in August. “[I]t’s time to pack your bag and leave city hall.” (The association’s vice president told the Chronicle that this kind of protest was unusual—that he’d never seen the group ask a mayor to step down in his nearly quarter century as a cop.)

Singer has also done PR work for the Oakland NAACP, which similarly called on Thao to resign and accused Price of creating “a heyday” for criminals. (In 2023, a group of Oakland progressives complained to the national NAACP that Oakland’s branch had been “reverting to lies, fear-mongering and the ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric that has targeted African Americans throughout our entire history.” They urged the local branch to end ties with Singer.) 

Singer has supported recalls in the past: In 2022, he went on a San Francisco podcast to promote the ouster of then-DA Chesa Boudin. He’s done PR work for at least a couple of Boudin’s opponents, including tech investors like Ron Conway and the ferociously antiprogressive Garry Tan. Conway is now a major funder of Oakland’s mayoral recall. 

On X lately, Singer regularly tweets multiple times a day about Thao and Price, and his firm, Singer Associates, sometimes joins in. “America’s most crime-ridden city is run by America’s most incompetent mayor,” he wrote recently. In July, he emailed the Oaklandside requesting a correction to an article about an ethics investigation into the anti-Thao campaign. When the Oaklandside’s editor asked whether Singer was a campaign spokesperson, Singer did not answer directly. “I would like to connect you with OUST,” he wrote back, referring to the recall committee, “but your reporters have burned their bridges with the group and its leadership.” (“Part of what makes Singer compelling as a man-behind-the-scenes is that it’s never quite clear which strings he is pulling or how far his influence reaches,” the Richmond Confidential’s Bonnie Chan wrote. “Singer himself is rarely willing to disclose his part in his firm’s public relations victories.”) Complicating matters, Oakland progressives say the recall campaigns are organized in a way that makes it hard to track who’s involved. “It’s very challenging for the public and even people in this industry to understand all the connections,” said Hanson, Thao’s chief of staff. “It makes for murky public dialogue; you can sense there is coordination.”

Since Singer says he’s not working for the recall campaigns, the mayor’s office wonders whether he might be working for fossil fuel interests; Thao recently alleged that certain recallers may be motivated by a desire to ship coal through Oakland’s port, something she’s opposed in the past. (Singer did not respond to my request for comment.) In August, Singer’s firm donated to an independent expenditure committee that’s run by Greg McConnell, a lobbyist who works for Insight Terminal Solutions, one of the companies that wants to build an Oakland coal terminal. That committee spent money on online ads for Brenda Harbin-Forte, who is running for city attorney and is also a leader of the mayoral recall campaign. 

Other progressives have questioned whether Singer might be working with Scott, the inflammatory recall leader. Singer regularly retweets Scott’s posts and shares his op-eds, and he’s written on X that Scott is “helping bring peace through positive, pragmatic, political change.” Singer didn’t respond to my question about this. When I asked Scott, he told me that Singer was probably just a fan. “I’m flattered,” he added. 

Over the summer, more questions emerged about Singer’s involvement in Thao’s political predicament. In June, two days after the recall election was certified, the FBI raided her home early in the morning as part of an ongoing investigation. That same day, Singer was planning to host a press conference for an affordable housing measure; some reporters set to cover his event were among those who knew to be outside the mayor’s home around 6 a.m. for the raid. The coincidence made some Oakland politicos raise their eyebrows. Had Singer somehow known about the raid in advance? Did he tip off the reporters? “The timing of all this is troubling,” Thao said afterward. “I want to know how the TV cameras knew to show up on my sleepy residential street so early in the morning to capture footage of the raid. And I want to know why Fox News and Breitbart were so prepared to fan the flames, and to tell a story that they want to tell, to bend the facts to shape a narrative. I have a lot of questions and I will get answers. We all will get answers.” (Singer did not respond to my questions about this incident.)

“The mayor’s office is in crisis,” Singer told the local ABC affiliate after the raid. “I don’t see how she overcomes this, it’s likely that she will wind up having to resign.” 

In October, Singer held a press conference at his office where 14 of the county’s police unions endorsed the recall of DA Price. Earlier that month, he also turned down my third request for an interview about his influence. “Thank you for letting me know that many people reference me, our agency, and our work, but I don’t have the time to devote right now to a profile. I am hardly a key figure, there are many people in Oakland and S.F. who have devoted countless hours walking, calling, donating and encouraging the public to vote for change,” he replied in an email. 

About a week later, he sent me a press release from the Price recall campaign with no additional comment. 

For decades, Americans have been sure that violence is rising, even when it isn’t. The Pew Research Center recently studied this phenomenon: In 23 of 27 Gallup polls since 1993, at least 60 percent of Americans said crime was higher in the United States than it had been a year earlier. But over that same period, FBI data showed that violent crime had actually dropped almost in half, and property crime had dropped even more. Americans today are much less likely to be a victim of violence than they were in 1993, but they sure as hell don’t feel that way. 

Local news coverage, Pew found, is likely a big reason why. You’ve probably heard the journalism adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” “Violent crime is much less common than property crime in the U.S., but Americans see local news about both types of crime with nearly the same frequency,” the researchers wrote, adding that many people also get their crime news on social media. “There’s a clear relationship between how much local crime news Americans consume and how concerned they are about their safety.” That’s not to knock crime reporters—I’m one of them. But it is to say that, sometimes, journalists make people believe that violence is more of a threat than it actually is. 

Some academics have started thinking about crime waves as “moral panics,” or mass fear about something that’s been exaggerated. Moral panics can be about almost anything—historically, uproars over “witchcraft” would fall into this category, while a more recent example might be concerns about kids becoming violent because of video games. The key isn’t whether the threat exists, but whether it has been inflated and by whom and for what reason. 

Stanley Cohen, the criminologist who named the phenomenon, identified the stages to a moral panic: Something is defined as a threat to society; the media amplifies the threat, treating it in a “stylized” fashion and drawing on prevailing popular prejudices; public anxiety is aroused and sharpened; “moral entrepreneurs” like activists or politicians or even savvy crisis communications specialists legitimize the panic by offering their own diagnoses and solutions. The panic dies down or results in change.

The first recorded crime wave moral panic was in 1744, when journalists in London, looking for something exciting to write about as news about foreign wars dwindled, started reporting on what they described as “swarms” of criminals, according to historian Richard Ward. Later in Victorian Britain, after reformers tried to roll back the use of public executions and floggings, journalists again led many readers to believe that crime had gone up, even though it hadn’t; lawmakers responded by enacting broader corporal punishment. Closer to home, the 1980s saw a moral panic about “crack babies,” notes social justice advocate Alec Karakatsanis, and in the ’90s a fear of teen “superpredators” helped President Bill Clinton pass the crime bill. “Crime waves” are frequently used to defend harsher punishments. Karakatsanis adds that “the ‘wave’…is often specifically manufactured by self-interested groups and complicit journalists precisely to have some political impact, whether it be the recall election of a DA whose policies they don’t like or blocking a bail reform bill or fear-mongering about slight shifts in budgets of police and prisons.”

“The ‘wave’…is often specifically manufactured by self-interested groups and complicit journalists precisely to have some political impact.”

More recently, crime panics in the United States have centered on retail theft. In 2021, a single shoplifting offense at a San Francisco Walgreens garnered 309 separate articles by local and national media over the course of a month. “This was during a public relations push by Walgreens, police unions, far-right media, and billionaire-funded DA recall activists to drive fear around ‘retail theft,’” Karakatsanis writes, referring to the recall of Chesa Boudin. Nationwide, the media’s obsession with shoplifting was so acute that the New York Times did a debunking in 2023, trying to answer why the issue had received so much attention, even though police data showed retail theft in most places was lower than it had been in years prior. 

Violent crime has also been inflated. After the presidential debate in September, when Trump insisted that crime was “through the roof” despite FBI data to the contrary, the co-hosts of Fox & Friends defended him: “There is the numbers and there’s the reality,” Brian Kilmeadesaid, and Ainsley Earhardt added that “we’re all a little bit more scared than we used to be.” Media reports about violence tend to increase before elections: In 2022, the number of crime segments on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC grew enormously before the midterm vote; on Fox News, and likely on CNN and MSNBC, too, crime coverage plummeted afterward. 

“Our common-sense understanding of crime waves is that crime rates are rapidly escalating and then falling off,” said sociologist Sacco, “but often the term is not used that way: It’s used to refer to an increase in public concern and media attention, rather than an increase in actual crime.” Moral panics, according to scholars Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton, are good for newsmakers: They “guarantee the kind of emotional involvement” that keeps readers or viewers coming back for more, and crime provides good visuals for broadcasters. In the political arena, the fearmongers can beat back any skepticism with a reliable rhetorical move. As Karakatsanis writes, “Anyone not reaffirming the narrative that crime by poor people is ‘out of control’ at any given moment—and anyone not responding to that problem with proposals of more prisons and police—doesn’t care about poor communities or communities of color.”

Oakland is a microcosm of these dynamics, and an example of the political consequences that can manifest when a mismatch grows between actual crime and people’s perceptions of it. Singer, recall committee leaders, and some local reporters have cast doubt on Oakland’s police department data showing that homicides and other offenses are falling rapidly in 2024. “Elected officials are still lying that crime is down,” Scott wrote to me in August. They have also linked business closures with crime in the city. When a Hilton hotel near Oakland’s airport announced in June that it was shutting down, some news reports speculated that crime was a cause. (“Unfortunately we are unable to comment,” a Hilton spokesperson told me when I asked whether this was true.) 

Still, Singer and doom-loopers like him are effective at swaying public opinion because they are tapping into something real: Regardless of what the crime data says, people feel like their elected officials have let them down, because they are seeing things that make them uneasy—more clearly than ever before. “Even if you have the same number of unhoused people or mentally ill people or people visibly using drugs” as you did before the pandemic, “it feels like this overwhelming scary presence because there’s not hundreds of other people commuting to work, going to happy hour, getting a Starbucks,” said Boudin, San Francisco’s former DA, who was recalled in part because of similar doom-loop rhetoric. “That feeling has been very successfully manipulated by the likes of Sam Singer,” he said, to go after progressives. In San Francisco and Oakland, Republican pundits and even some mainstream Democrats have masterfully equated images of poverty and addiction with crime, arguing that public safety and liberal leadership are incompatible. Crime is “a canard,” but it’s also “the soft belly for progressives,” said Oden, the political scientist. “It’s creating a crisis around the individual who had nothing to do with the reason for the crisis to be what it is.” 

Here is where Singer is so effective, whether the underlying story is a tiger jumping a low wall or a city navigating decades of municipal disinvestment. In his hands, the crisis becomes one of individuals behaving badly, a stylized drama of bullies and thieves and enabling corrupt politicians, not of low walls and institutional neglect. 

In 2022, during the movement to oust Boudin, Singer spoke despairingly of “the tents, the defecation, the urination, just last week the vandalism of…a Michelin-starred restaurant.” He lamented that “San Francisco is a shadow of its former self, and that really has to do with the permissiveness of certain members of the board of supervisors as well as the district attorney’s office. They’ve created a situation where there are no consequences, and when there are no consequences of doing wrong, wrong just proliferates, and right now it’s out of hand.” Of course, people are living in tents because they can’t afford housing, and they’re defecating and urinating outside because they don’t have housing to defecate and urinate in, but in Singer’s narrative the problem of housing recedes—what low walls?—and the failures of the humans getting mauled are magnified. Singer then ties a bow around the package by invoking the vandalism at the restaurant, a nonsequitur that encourages his audience to see, in people living on the streets, not the effects of a housing crisis but the sources of crime. He offers an explanation (“permissiveness”) and a villain: progressive leaders, who now must be ousted.

In August he used a similar framework when he tweeted that Oakland had been on the “upswing” until Thao and Price were elected, but then its “future crumbled before its eyes…resulting in mayhem, violence, crime and chaos.”  

“Even though we know for a fact that the district attorney is not the only factor in public safety, what Singer Associates is so effective in doing is making you forget that logic and lean into the villain narrative,” said Oakland Rising’s Manigo. “It’s like, ‘Who can we hang up there as the piñata to pound on for problems that are complex, that we all know are complex?” said DeBerry of the Prosecutors Alliance. “If crime was simple we would have solved it a long time ago; it’s not like the arrival of one new actor,” whether the mayor or the DA, “somehow caused the sky to fall.” Singer effectively “sets up the problem of Oakland as a city out of control, in a way that sets up the solution of new leadership that can pump the brakes and stop this careen into a doom loop,” said Pamela Mejia at the nonprofit Berkeley Media Studies Group. 

The situation is exacerbated as more local papers fold due to financial problems. “No longer will a daily newspaper bear the name of Oakland,” SFGate wrote in 2016 after six Bay Area newspapers were consolidated into two publications. “In the absence of information, the lies or misinformation spreads,” Oden said. Meanwhile, social media has given politicos a bigger platform to create their own news: Scott, who leads the Thao recall campaign, hosts a video series called Gotham Oakland that regularly blasts progressives. “I do not call myself a journalist; I’m very open that I’m a propagandist—a truthful propagandist,” Scott told me.

All these factors add up. Mejia at the Berkeley Media Studies Group cites a phenomenon called the “mean world” syndrome: When people consume a lot of news about crime, they become convinced the world around them is a dangerous place. And when they see homelessness conflated with violence, they may buy into that idea, too. In September, Oakland business owners gathered with former police chief LeRonne Armstrong, who is now running for city council, to complain about progressive officials who planned to put a homeless shelter near the restaurants at Jack London Square. “As we watch the crime statistics go down, people’s perception of crime hasn’t changed,” Dorcia White, who owns Everett & Jones BBQ, told reporters at a press conference, explaining why she opposed placing a shelter so close to the business district. “We feed the homeless nightly, and as that population grows, so do a lot of problems.”

“We don’t have to fearmonger—we are scared!” Scott told me over the phone, yelling. “My lady doesn’t want to go down the street to her car without an escort—we’re scared! My neighbor was stabbed to death by a crazy homeless person—we’re scared!”  

All the data in the world won’t change a simple fact: “If you don’t feel safe in a city,” Singer said in 2022, “then you’re not safe.” And with that, the moral entrepreneur had made his case.

Singer had little more to say when, after declining multiple interview requests, I sent him a long list of questions for this story. “Samantha, I have no role in the recall campaigns,” he said in an email. “It is troubling to see you and Mother Jones openly ignore the Blacks and Asians who started and run these political movements.” 

It was a playbook described by Karakatsanis, nearly verbatim. In not reaffirming the narrative about crime, I was showing a lack of concern for communities of color. Singer went on: “Your questions to me demonstrate your discriminatory attitude toward people of color, the working class, the Nor Cal Carpenters Union and Oakland Police Officers Union.” For me to not focus on the nonwhite leadership of the recall movements “is disrespectful and discriminatory,” he concluded. “They are the leaders of The Revolution.” 

On a Friday night in August, Mayor Thao sat on a stage in Oakland’s Chinatown during a “public safety town hall,” trying to dispel some of these bad vibes. Outside, a recall campaigner held a sign with the image of a sinking ship labeled “the ThaoTanic.” Inside, people who didn’t have a seat stood around the perimeter as Thao and her team listed some of the steps they’d taken to make people safer, from bringing back the Ceasefire gun violence prevention strategy (which Singer’s former client Armstrong, the ex-police chief, had effectively shelved) to installing more cameras on streets to identify car thieves. (Although they’re often conflated, property crime like car theft is not the same as violence. Such is the power of a moral panic that even Thao, one of its targets, seems to have accepted some of the doom-loop premise.)  

Seated alongside her was the city’s new police chief, Floyd Mitchell. He took a question from the audience about people not trusting the city’s crime statistics, and tried to set the record straight. Though property crime data can take a while to update, sometimes leading to inaccuracies, he said data on violent crimes against people—think murders, rapes, aggravated assaults—“are 100 percent accurate.” “There’s absolutely no need for me or anyone in our organization to come up here and jeopardize their personal or professional integrity to try to give you inaccurate crime stats,” he said. “I understand people’s skepticism,” added Holly Joshi, who leads Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, but “as a city we weren’t questioning the stats when crime was up.”  

Dispelling the bad vibes is an uphill battle. The Sam Singers of the world have money and time to fuel their narratives; they are at least offering an explanation for the visible deterioration of civic life, one that comports with centuries of folk wisdom about crime and criminals. Progressive politicians have not devoted the same energy to counter the doom. “There’s a market for content that’s salacious related to Oakland,” said Hanson, Thao’s chief of staff. “That’s a space where the city is perhaps less nimble, and [it] does not dedicate any public resources to combat that.” A journalist at the Bay Area News Group told me he reached out to the Oakland Police Department more than 10 times while reporting a story about Oakland crime, but nobody responded, so he turned instead to the police union, repped by Singer: The resulting story, which published in September, said Oakland’s violent crime rates had surged but did not mention 2024 data, which shows they’ve been dropping. Singer himself has been quoted in other articles about specific Oakland crime incidents, when it would more commonly be the police department’s job to comment. “There are PR firms that are progressive, and they cost money,” said the attorney Walter Riley, who helps lead a group countering the recalls. “Our group does not have that, so we are at a disadvantage in that sense. We are not gonna get the coverage of Fox News or even the Chronicle newspaper.”  

It’s also more difficult to convey nuanced messages about crime. Scapegoating a villain is more emotionally satisfying than dissecting the societal structures that perpetuate lawlessness—things like racism, poverty, unaffordable housing, and unemployment that have no easy answers. Who wants to stare at a wall, to really examine all its holes and dimensions, when you could instead be morbidly entertained by a tiger hunting down miscreant teens? 

Thao recently brought on PR specialists from the Worker Agency to help her fight the recall, but it may be too little too late: According to Oakland’s Chamber of Commerce, a majority of respondents in a recent poll said “current progressive policies are not benefiting the city,” and more than half indicated they would vote the mayor out; nearly half in another poll by a pro-recall group said they didn’t think Price was doing a good job. “Progressives have the power to defeat anything because there’s more people—the population they represent is larger,” said political scientist Oden. “But they can never organize them enough.”

Who wants to stare at a wall, to really examine all its holes and dimensions, when you could instead be morbidly entertained by a tiger hunting down miscreant teens? 

On a Saturday in August, I watched some of them try to prove him wrong. Respect Our Vote, No Recalls, a coalition of residents, activists, nonprofits, and Democratic clubs, called a community meeting inside At Thy Word Ministries Church in East Oakland to talk through their communication strategies. “It’s really true that democracy is in the balance,” Pastor B.K. Woodson, one of the group’s leaders, said from a podium. “We want you to take the information you get here today and spread it around: In every conversation you have, ask: Are you registered? Will you be voting?”

A woman in the audience raised her hand and asked about the media: She felt “bombarded” by negative news about Oakland and wondered how to respond. “Call up those MFers,” a woman in a sunhat urged her, referring to journalists. “Tell the real story.” Another woman in a flannel shirt got emotional while talking about her effort to fact-check the bad information online. “I don’t wanna be the only one on Nextdoor fighting these assholes!” she said, starting to cry. 

Sam Singer’s name never came up, but the meeting was unmistakably a rally against not just his message but his method, the emphasis on wayward individuals and not the low walls leaving Oaklanders vulnerable. In the end, the progressive leaders urged each other to get offline, to stop all the doom-scrolling and go meet their neighbors. “To get the real information, you need to go to the communities that are in the trenches with their sleeves up,” said Stewart Chen, president of the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council. “Have these discussions outside these rooms,” said Turner, the Democratic delegate. 

“You are our hope,” said Woodson, calling the meeting to an end. “Go talk to people.”

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

Yes, you read that headline right.

At a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Donald Trump said he would be OK with someone trying to assassinate him by firing through a group of journalists. “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” Trump said, when discussing the bulletproof glass protecting him.

Trump, talking about the protective glass around him on stage at his rally in PA: "To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind." pic.twitter.com/s0pDzWAS6z

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) November 3, 2024

The Trump campaign tried to clean up the Republican candidate’s comments…by suggesting people should not believe what they heard, and repeating baseless claims that Democratic rhetoric was to blame for the assassination attempts against him. Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, claimed in a statement that the ex-president “was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!”

When I wrote to the Trump campaign asking for a follow-up statement and pointing out that Trump’s actual statement didn’t match Cheung’s explanation, Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary, resent Cheung’s statement. (Just 2 days ago, Leavitt claimed on Fox News that Trump was running “a positive campaign based on real joy.”)

But several reporters pointed out on social media that the campaign’s statement did not accurately represent Trump’s comments and that his rhetoric has emboldened threats against the press. “This being a joke or not, as someone who has attended dozens of Trump’s rallies—including the assassination attempt in Butler, PA—and has been personally threatened repeatedly, I sincerely hope no one attempts to act on this,” CNN reporter Alayna Treene posted on X.

As my colleague Dan Friedman pointed out, these disturbing comments are the latest in Trump’s escalating threats against the free press as Election Day nears. As Dan reported this weekend, Trump told Fox News on Saturday morning, “To make America great, you really do have to get the news shaped up”; later in the day, at a rally in North Carolina, he called the reporters present “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.” And as my colleague Pema Levy wrote on Friday, Trump also filed a frivolous lawsuit against CBS News and sent a complaint against the Washington Post to the Federal Election Commission—both of which alleged the outlets were favoring his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. And while it may be easy to dismiss these moves as just the latest Trump absurdities, they foretell the dangers he could pose to the free press. As Pema wrote:

It’s one thing for Trump to sue CBS as a citizen. But if he wins, Trump could make sure this type of suit comes from the Justice Department. It’s a warning shot to the media that any coverage Trump deems unfavorable, including an interview with a rival, could land them in court opposite the US Government.

In a way, though, journalists are not special: They are just one of many groups Trump might target in a second term.

Update, Nov. 4: The New York Times Tech Guild began their strike on Monday, just ahead of Election Day. Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of external communications for the newspaper, said in a statement: “We’re in one of the most consequential periods of coverage for our readers and have robust plans in place to ensure that we are able to fulfill our mission and serve our readers. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected actions, we’re disappointed that colleagues would strike at this time, which is both unnecessary and at odds with our mission.”

With two days until Election Day, the New York Times is confronting a potential crisis: The army of tech workers who keep its digital platforms running is threatening to go on strike.

Nearly 700 members of the newspaper’s Tech Guild—which represents the workers who power the famous election needle, mobile push alerts, Wordle, the audio app, and many other things—voted in September to authorize a strike. Now, just a few days out from an election in which the candidates look locked in a dead heat, the workers say a strike could come to fruition if they do not reach an agreement with management, who they allege “have demonstrated an unwillingness at the table to be reasonable on key contract demands.” They say they have been bargaining for more than two years.

“We have made it clear that we need to reach an agreement before the election in order to avert a strike,” the guild wrote in a Nov. 1 letter to management.

Among the Tech Guild’s demands are just cause for termination with no exceptions, higher wages, and more initiatives to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion among their workforce.

Times management, for its part, says the workers, who are mostly engineers, are already among the highest paid at the company, earning an average salary of $190,000—$40,000 more than journalists in the Times Guild, the union for the paper’s media workers. Their other requests, Semafor reported in September, include a four-day workweek and non-performance-based annual bonuses. The Tech Guild says members who are women and people of color are paid less than men and white people; Times management counters that the methodology behind those comparisons is “misleading” because it does not compare people in comparable roles and that a pay analysis conducted last year “found no evidence of discrimination.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of external communications at the Times, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “The election deadline timing is arbitrary and was a decision made unilaterally by the Tech Guild leadership. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected actions, threatening a strike at this time, feels both unnecessary and at odds with our mission.” 

While the timing may be inconvenient for the country’s most influential paper, the Election Day deadline seems meant to remind management that its sense of journalistic exceptionalism relies upon the workers that power it. Rhoades Ha, for example, said in her statement, “There is no outlet that provides The Times’s depth of reporting and analysis.” The Times has touted its election needle, launched in 2016, as an accurate and early predictor of the election’s outcome; union members say without them, it won’t function.

So could the Times website go dark on Election Day if hundreds of tech workers are on strike? It’s unclear. “We have robust plans in place to ensure that we are able to fulfill our mission and serve our readers,” Rhoades Ha said. She declined to respond to follow-up questions.

What changes if more people showed up to vote?

One answer emerges by comparing Minnesota and Tennessee—two states with vastly different voter turnout rates. Minnesota leads the nation, with nearly 80 percent of eligible voters participating in the 2020 election. With that, Minnesotans have elected leaders who have advanced a popular agenda: universal school meals, free public college tuition, paid family and medical leave, and the restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. According to polling, each of these proposals is broadly popular across the entire country.

By contrast, in Tennessee, voter turnout in 2020 was only 59 percent—enabling a very unpopular Republican supermajority to ignore calls for stricter gun control, despite widespread support. Instead, they’ve focused on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and enacting some of the country’s harshest abortion laws. Tennessee once had abortion protections, but a historically low-turnout election in 2014 paved the way for today’s restrictive policies.

In my new video, I run the numbers. Watch:

Free school meals. Childcare. Health care. The thing is, when voters show up, popular things happen. @garrison_hayes runs the numbers pic.twitter.com/whW7MLjj7l

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 3, 2024

The differences between Minnesota and Tennessee make it clear: Turnout has sweeping consequences. Go vote.

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire.