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How the Media Walked us into Autocracy (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report

They’re abusing them for the profits they want to make from advertising, which of course begins to replace journalists and editors who want to do the right thing with journalists and editors who got their finger to the wind and are worried about the money before reporting the truth in an equitable fashion. It even gets worse. The Times created Trump. They kept giving him more and more publicity. They created JD Vance. Whoever heard of JD Vance? They kept writing about his book.

By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, 9 Mar 25

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The American corporate coup d’état is almost complete as the first weeks of the Trump administration exemplify. If there has been one person who saw this coming, and has taken courageous action over the years to prevent it, it would be Ralph Nader. The former presidential candidate, consumer advocate and corporate critic joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle his life’s work battling the corporate takeover of the country and how Americans can still fight back today despite the growing repression from the White House.

“The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power, in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker,” Nader tells Hedges.

Nader asks people to look around them and witness the decay through the ordinary parts of their lives. “If you just look at the countervailing forces that hold up a society—civilized norms, due process of law and democratic traditions—they’re all either AWOL [absent without official leave] or collapsing,” he said. Civic groups are outnumbered by corporate lobbyists, the media barely pays attention to any grassroots organizing and the protests that do occur, such as the encampments at universities, are brutally suppressed.

It’s not an impossible task, Nader says, recalling the precedent of organizing in the U.S. He says the fundamental basics are supported by a majority of people regardless of their political labels.

Chris Hedges

The New York Times published a lead column on January 18th, 2025, titled, “Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?” The columnist’s answer is yes, unless, and I quote, “defenders of democracy have to stay united, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions elude capture.” What is absent from the Times article is the complicity of the media, and especially the New York Times, in shutting down coverage of the fight by unions, grassroots movements, whistleblowers, and civic organizations, often led by the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, to placate their advertisers. This decision, made by newspapers such as the New York Times four decades ago, essentially erased these popular initiatives from public consciousness.

This erasure—done to placate wealthy corporations and oligarchs and boost revenue—bolstered the power of corporations and the government to dominate and shape public discourse and in the process saw them become ever more secretive and ever more autocratic. As Ralph Nader notes, the regular reporting about what activists were doing in the 1960s and 1970s made possible the consumer, environmental, labor, and freedom of information laws. Similar efforts now cannot gather momentum with media invisibility. Legislative hearings, prosecutions, and regulatory actions cannot get jump-started just by the people insistent on a just and democratic society. How often do you see op-eds from civic labor advocates, Ralph asks. How often do you read reviews of their books? How often do you see profiles of them?

How often have the groundbreaking studies by Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Veterans for Peace, Union of Concerned Scientists, etc. received coverage? This erasure stands in stark contrast to the coverage given over to those on the far right and corporations. Figures like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Elon Musk get plenty of press. The media landscape is siloed. Media outlets, both the legacy media and the digital media, cater to well-defined demographics. But the power of the legacy media, should it decide to use its power, is to help set the agenda through its reporting. Most digital sites feed off of the reporting of the establishment media spinning it left or right. And what it does not cover often does not get covered. Legions of reporters, 500 full-time reporters cover the Congress, hundreds more sit at the feet of the titans of commerce and Wall Street, spit back to the public official communiques, and fawning interviews with the powerful, the famous, and the rich. Unless they are deployed outside the halls of Congress and the centers of power, what is left of our democracy, and not much of it is left, will wither and die.

Joining me to discuss our march towards tyranny, the complicity of institutions such as the media and the liberal class, including the Democratic Party, and what we must do to wrest back power is Ralph Nader, who has been fighting corporate power longer more effectively and with more integrity than any other American. Ralph, let’s go back to where we were because where we are now is a reaction to what you, you were at the epicenter of it, built. We can begin with your groundbreaking book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which should be taught in every journalism school. It is a masterful piece of investigative reporting. But let’s go back to what we had and then how they organized to take it away.

Ralph Nader

Yeah, thank you, Chris. It’s very well documented, the whole history of it. When I wrote the book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a reporter for Science Magazine picked it up and then the New York Times picked it up off of Science Magazine and it made page one. And so that was a good start.

Chris Hedges

Ralph, just want to interrupt for people who don’t know, these were cars made by GM that were not safe…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Chris Hedges

Let me just stop you because Ralph, let’s not bypass the fact that GM mounted a pretty intense and dirty campaign against you.

Ralph Nader

Yes, they hired a private detective with several former FBI people. That’s what happened to a lot of FBI agents when they retired, they go to work for these large corporations to follow me around the country, try to get dirt on me, to discredit my testimony before Congress. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………….. Ralph Nader

Yes, and at the same time the companies hired a firm called Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering and Lloyd Cutler would go and have meetings with editors of the New York Times and Post and saying, what are you guys doing giving this guy so much print? Don’t you know he’s bad for business? And the inference was that they were going to lose advertising if they didn’t shut us out. Once the Times started scaling down, then the Washington Post took note because they were of the same mindset and both of them were about to go public and sell stock on the stock exchange, which gave them even more vulnerability to suppression. And then that dried up more and more of the evening news. We used to get on the network news.

It’s almost impossible to get on the network evening news now. And the same with radio. At the same time, there emerged public radio and public broadcasting, and they were scared from the get-go that the companies would go after their funding on Capitol Hill and crimp their style. And so they covered us very little as well.

……………………………………………………….the cycle starts again against the whole set of new injustices. But all these forces I’ve just mentioned started shutting us down. We were saved for a short period by the Jimmy Carter administration. He appointed very good people to the regulatory agencies, the auto safety agency, the job safety agency, the EPA, and so on. But that was just a four-year reprieve and they were still counter-attacking. More lobbyists, more political action committees, more indignant calls to reporters and editors and publishers to shut us down. So, you know, that was their golden age, the mass media, what we call now the corporate media. And it’s completely changed now. And I say to reporters or editors, or publishers that I can manage to reach. It’s not easy. What are you ashamed of your golden age for? Look what you did for the country, just exercising your duty and professional responsibilities for newsworthiness. And now you don’t do it.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. we’re paying the price now in wars of empire, in the domination of corporate supremacists over everything.

They’re raising our children with that iPhone five, seven hours a day, undermining parental authority, separating these children from family, community, nature, harming their health with junk food and sedentary living, with very little kids playing outside anymore. There isn’t anything that corporate commercialism now has not invaded. They’ve commercialized the churches. They’ve commercialized the academic world. They’ve commercialized almost everything outside the marketplace they see as a profit center. So they want to corporatize the post office. They want to take over public drinking water departments and corporatize them. They want to corporatize the public school system. One way or another, they want to corporatize the public lands or take the public lands. And they’ve never been more aggressive, never been more successful. And the civic community, which used to be relied on to resist, can’t get any media. And we have tried. Last year, we made a major effort to turn Labor Day into a real workers day with events all over the country. We got the unions behind us……………………………………………………………….

………………………………………………………….. . So basically when you shut out the civic community, Chris, you shut down democracy. And I placed the responsibility not just on the Democratic Party, but first and foremost on the mass media.

……………………………………………  the independent press is not such a hot shot either. The magazines like In These Times, Washington Monthly, Progressive Magazine, The Nation, they don’t cover civic community activities. They just pontificate. They do have some good articles, and they have their columnists, many of whom are getting very tired and repetitive. They don’t cover what Public Citizen, Common Cause, Pension Rights Center, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Union of Concerned Scientists, Veterans for Peace especially gets completely blacked out regardless of their demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience all over the country against the military machine, the empire, the weaponization of the genocide in Gaza. They haven’t had a single article, they had to put out all kinds of great material people go to veteransforpeace.org and see for yourself.

These are veterans who’ve known wars and they can’t even get any coverage. And you can’t get any coverage of the lack of coverage. You can’t get the journalism publications to do any coverage of the censorship. So this is the ultimate censorship, the shutdown of the First Amendment. When the press, which is given a cachet in the First Amendment, there’s no other industry mentioned by name in the Constitution, are abusing their privileges for a mess of prodigies. 

They’re abusing them for the profits they want to make from advertising, which of course begins to replace journalists and editors who want to do the right thing with journalists and editors who got their finger to the wind and are worried about the money before reporting the truth in an equitable fashion. It even gets worse. The Times created Trump. They kept giving him more and more publicity. They created JD Vance. Whoever heard of JD Vance? They kept writing about his book. They kept writing about his Senate race more than the opponent, Tim Ryan, and the US Senate race in Ohio………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Ralph Nader

In a broader sense, all it comes down to are two things. Trump will self-destruct because he knows no boundaries. So his greatest enemy is Trump. And you will see the unraveling of Trump in the succeeding weeks. I would not be surprised that if he continues his bull in the China shop, illegal, wild, flailing, affecting tens of millions of people in terms of their dire necessities of life in favor of his corporate supremacist, that he will be impeached and convicted in the U.S. Senate. His own party will turn against him because when they see the polls, which are already dropping since January 20th, by the way, when they see the polls and they realize it’s either them or Trump, they will always take their own political survival.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/08/how-the-media-walked-us-into-autocracy-w-ralph-nader-the-chris-hedges-report/

March 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees.

The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.

New Yorker By Kyle Chayka, February 26, 2025

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent.

American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a system of industrial organization that came to be known as “Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties, I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census, which helped identify Jews in the country.  As a recent feature in the Guardian by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael S. Malone was issuing warnings about emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government operations.

American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Musk has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies whose authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. DOGE has gained access to Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly accomplishments. As Mimura put it, “You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.” 

The techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national scale. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in Texas.

However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plans demonstrated “FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.”

Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. 

According to McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. 

 Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Science_030125&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d23d24c17c6adf3bf435&cndid=30183386&hasha=432fc0d0ad6543e820e2dfcd39f76c35&hashb=e1c24f6a6459c7d1d625eb2ea55d9dfbbb4633bf&hashc=ac5a1f5526e7292c73f49dfa8fb6d5d0cb87d8773cec3b9b03d38a4ce482d7c8&esrc=subscribe-page&mbid=CRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_Science_Tech

March 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | 1 Comment