Next week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washington Post.) Needless to say, none of this is normal.
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While the fires out west have continued to rage, the American right has been in rare form, blaming any Democratic official or progressive policy they can think of for this ongoing natural disaster.
The behavior has been particularly grotesque and craven — which is saying a lot for a political party led by Donald Trump — but mostly unsurprising for those of us who have been documenting the hyper-polarized information warfare of the last decade. Naturally, Trump has led the attack, not waiting for even a hint of relief in the battle against the flames before launching a series of attacks against Gov. Gavin Newsom and others.
Republicans have fallen in line, putting on display the party’s utter lack of empathy. It’s an emptiness of the soul that is juxtaposed by the emptiness felt by so many people in California as they look around at possessions, homes, neighborhoods and lives that are now, in some cases, completely gone, as Brian Tyler Cohen put it the other day.
More from the Doom podcast
The coming misinformation war - Meta is ending fact-checking at a time when reputable information is needed more than ever.
Threats, harassment and intimidation at the polls with Mike Wendling of the BBC
'Hands up, don't shoot' - The legacy of Ferguson with DeRay McKesson
Cohen, who has called Los Angeles home for the last 15 years, has been one of the lucky ones. His home and life are intact. A powerful voice in independent media, Cohen has consistently called out the insanity, absurdity, lies, cons, and shamelessness — as the title of his recent book makes clear — of the American right in the Trump era.
I caught up with Cohen recently about the causes of the California wildfires, which have little to do with the culture war grievances being put forth by Trump and Republicans, and more to do with the issue they continuously ignore: climate change.
You can view our discussion above, listen to it here, or subscribe to the American Doom podcast on Apple and Spotify, as well as our YouTube page.
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