Why Trump’s attack on Stars and Stripes was a gut punch | Will Bunch Newsletter

You’ve probably noticed that many of your favorite TV news anchors are on vacation right now, because the conventional wisdom is that nothing ever happens in August. That conventional wisdom has been wrong since Aug. 24, 79 A.D., when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The calendar has failed to stop natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina (see item below) or human-made ones like Richard Nixon, who resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. I’m going to tempt fate and take some vacation time next week, including a rare newsletter skip. I’ll see you in two weeks. What could possibly go wrong?

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Less than two months after the U.S. dropped the most powerful weapon humankind had ever invented — the atomic bomb — on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American military arrived in Japan to implement a very different kind of tool in the U.S. arsenal of democracy.

A free and largely unfettered newspaper.

The first edition of the Stars and Stripes Pacific newspaper was published from downtown Tokyo on Oct. 3, 1945, when the ink on the Japanese surrender that ended World War II was barely dry. This was the start of a decades-long run when print journalism was still the best way to get information that could be entertaining or essential out to hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who initially occupied Japan and other Pacific outposts and later would see combat in Korea and Vietnam.

Stars and Stripes Pacific — like virtually everything tied to U.S. imperial might after the war — is part of a complicated legacy that overlapped with American censorship of local and outside media in Japan. Yet U.S. soldiers managed to get their own information from a publication that celebrated the better angels of the First Amendment back home, with coverage of Tokyo’s war-crimes trial and later from the front lines in Korea.

It was only part of a much grander legacy for Stars and Stripes, which has been the American military’s independent news source tracing all the way back to 1861 and the Slaveholder’s Rebellion.

Famously, when legendary World War II Gen. George Patton threatened to jail editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin over a cartoon lampooning him, his superior Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stopped him. “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ newspaper,” Ike reportedly said. “We will not interfere.” Mauldin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his wartime cartoons. In 2010, Stars and Stripes reporters exposed the Pentagon’s efforts to slant mainstream media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, and won a George Polk Award.

That feisty spirit of Stars and Stripes runs deep in my family’s DNA. My maternal grandfather Thomas Blender, who’d been a photo editor at the Peoria Journal-Star before joining the Army, was sent to Tokyo in those early days to work as a top editor of the Pacific publication. I’ve always regretted, after Grandpa Tom died when I was only 11, that I never got to ask him about those days once I’d been infected with the family journalism bug that I’d eventually pass on to my own son.

That must be why it felt like a personal attack last Friday when the Pentagon of Donald Trump and his likeminded “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth obliterated 155 years of editorial freedom by firing its editor, its publisher — who, seeing the writing on the wall, was about to retire — and its Middle East correspondent. That journalist, Lara Korte, said she was pink-slipped for an interview with CBS News about her reporting on the dreadful conditions for Navy sailors aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

The fuse had already been lit back in January when Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted the regulations regarding the government-funded news org by stripping language that called for “a free flow of news and information to its readership without news management or censorship.” The new rules, which instead said Stars and Stripes’ journalism “must be consistent with good order and discipline of the military,” were seen as an invitation for censorship. Sean Parnell, the formerly embattled Pennsylvania Republican who is now Hegseth’s chief spokesman, blasted Stars and Stripes for “woke distractions.”

Three months later, Jacqueline Smith, the internal editorial watchdog of Stars and Stripes at the Pentagon, criticized military brass for editorial interference and was promptly fired. But the last straw for the outlet came two weeks ago with its aggressive reporting about problems aboard the Lincoln, which spent nine months mostly at sea with dwindling supplies tied to Trump’s ill-advised war on Iran. Journalist Alison Bath reported that sailors’ families were growing deeply concerned about the mental health of the aircraft carrier’s exhausted crew.

That work epitomized everything that has been good and decent about Stars and Stripes. What the newspaper has shown at its best is that — despite all the contradictions and moral failings of U.S. postwar imperialism — a democratic government can value the press freedom that its armed readers literally died for from Gettysburg to Omaha Beach. That high-minded ideal was a beacon to set us apart from our adversaries in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia who never would have permitted the kind of honest coverage that Stars and Stripes offered for decades.

Until America found itself with a government with the same philosophy as 1939 Berlin or 1949 Moscow. Just like his boss, Hegseth has shown nothing but contempt for the notion that his “warfighters” might actually serve to protect Americans’ right to the truth about their own government, including the foibles of his Pentagon.

On Monday, it came out that the military’s U.S. Central Command told The Intercept that it maintains “a list of people to disregard,” aka. a blacklist. This is the same Defense Department — sorry, Pete, that is still its legal name — that also forced out any journalist who wouldn’t sign their integrity away to work in the press room at the Pentagon.

The firings at Stars and Stripes and the Pentagon’s apparent desire to turn the award-winning newspaper into a Pravda-style propaganda sheet for Hegseth’s testosterone-dosed military feels like a new low on the road toward the utter obliteration of all press freedom.

Since returning to power last year, Trump and his MAGA minions have waged war against journalists they’ve called “the enemy of the people” — and they’ve done so not through some grand Orwellian censorship edict, but through a mix of billionaire carrots and sticks that have inflicted a thousand small cuts. That means rewards for wealthy allies who buy prominent news orgs (think the Ellison family assuming control of CBS and being on the brink of getting CNN) or neuter them (Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post) — but lawsuits, obstacles, or straight-up bullying for everyone else.

Another alarming example of the precarious state of the First Amendment came earlier this month when a lawyer for Trump threatened a $5 billion (with a “b”) lawsuit against a left-leaning think tank, the Center for American Progress, if it didn’t retract a factual report that the Trump regime’s deployments of National Guard troops to U.S. city have not lowered crime rates.

The CAP has stood its ground so far, but this reveals the state of play right now. MAGA World has already either bought off or intimidated much of the mainstream media, and so now they are hoping they can crush the outliers like Stars and Stripes or CAP, one by one.

The mission that my grandfather was dispatched to Tokyo to carry out after World War II was on the fringe of an idea that came to be known as “soft power” — the now-quaint notion that America could form healthy alliances with the rest of the world through good things like vaccinating children or printing uncensored journalism, instead of dropping bombs. Other organizations meant to show people in oppressed lands that press freedom and democracy are things to fight for — like Radio Free Europe — have been forced to grapple with Trump-ordered cutbacks.

The right knows exactly what it is doing — that truth and knowledge are kryptonite for its authoritarian project. Increasingly, they are saying the quiet parts out loud. The great Tennessee journalist Phil Williams recently unearthed a soundbite from a white supremacist confab in Rome in which the conversation turned to America’s growing number of news deserts where journalism has all but perished.

“Local media has been dying all over America, which means that there’s essentially no real way to hold local governments accountable — and they can do whatever they want,” white nationalist Kevin DeAnna told the gathering. ”You should be fantasizing about this. This is a good thing."

No, it’s not. The government’s bludgeoning of Stars and Stripes has truly — to borrow from a storied military campaign of yesteryear — crossed the Rubicon of no return for its all-out blitzkrieg against the truth. All of us, including the laggards of the mainstream media who continue to pretend this war doesn’t exist, need to fight back with everything we have.

I never got to know my Grandpa Tom very well, but I know in my soul that this is what he would have wanted.

Question: Do PA Dems have a legit chance of freeing us from Joe Pittman’s reign of terror in the state Senate? — Travis (@unraptured.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Travis, the answer is absolutely yes. Democrats in the Keystone State have managed to chip away at what once seemed like a permanent GOP majority in the upper chamber at the same time they’ve recaptured the state House. The current Republican Senate edge is just 27-23, meaning Democrats have to flip only three more GOP seats among November’s 25 contests. Every arrow — Trump’s high disapproval, the popularity of Gov. Josh Shapiro at the top of the ticket, and special-election results like last week’s shocking Democratic House victory in a blood-red district in western Pennsylvania — points towards a blue tsunami. The Democrats have reportedly targeted three suburban swing districts. The big question for 2027 may be whether Shapiro really wants a Harrisburg trifecta pushing him to the left.

OK, last week’s question about Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s pointed comments regarding Donald Trump’s corruption, including an eyebrow-raising mention of ever-present aide Natalie Harp, was kind of a slam dunk for readers of this newsletter. You saw nothing uncivil in the fighting spirit of his remarks, and a surprising number of you echoed back a phrase from my question: “a breath of fresh air.” Wrote Daniel Fleischer: “Jon Ossoff called Trump a ‘crook.’ If anything, that’s a euphemism understating Trump’s criminality.” Added Patricia Eisenberg: “What he said was undeniably true - the President chose this young woman to travel on his escape plane, not one of his cabinet members.”

📮 This week’s question: It seems like the GOP’s got nothing ahead of the midterms beyond its opposition to what it calls “men playing women’s sports.” It’s kind of pathetic, but it does pose a question for Democrats: Do they strongly embrace transgender rights, or is that risking political defeat in today’s culture wars? I have a strong opinion on this, but what do you think? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “transgender politics” in the subject line.

Exactly 21 years ago today, a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean rapidly intensified into a hurricane — Hurricane Katrina — and raced across Florida on a path into the Gulf of Mexico, where it became a Category 5 monster. Still, many of us in 2005 briefly thought the Gulf Coast dodged a bullet when Katrina weakened slightly and its center struck what looked like only a glancing blow on populated New Orleans. Then, one by one, the city’s levees began to break, and the water rose.

The death and destruction in Katrina’s wake was covered around the clock on cable TV, yet it took a couple of days for news anchors to articulate what viewers were seeing with their own eyes. The thousands of people who crowded interstate overpasses or were trapped on roofs were almost all Black, and most were desperately poor.

In These Times wrote the following week that “many Americans were surprised that most of the victims of the New Orleans flood were Black: Their image of the Crescent City had been one of jazz, tasty cuisine and the good-natured excesses of its lively festivals. Where did all those black people come from, they wondered; and where were the white victims?” Katrina triggered some long overdue conversations about inequality and racism in America, and the inept response from the George W. Bush administration would start his steep decline in public approval. Long before the roughly 1,400 New Orleanians who died in the flooding or chaotic aftermath could be buried, many folks were asking how to prevent this from ever happening again.

One generation later, it’s happening again.

It wasn’t a hurricane that struck Gary, Indiana and surrounding communities in the state’s northwest corner exactly two weeks ago on Aug. 11 — just a thunderstorm — but the winds were nearly as intense, snapping trees and downing power lines across the region. Gary’s 67,000, predominantly Black residents hunkered down in the dark nights and blistering hot August days as their refrigerated food went bad, and waited for help. And waited.

While life returned to normal across the rest of the storm-battered Midwest, the massive outage in the region that includes Gary that began with some 375,000 homes lacking electricity dwindled at a snail’s pace. After two weeks, there were still more than 5,000 families without power and struggling with spoiled food and closed schools and workplaces. There is growing anger among residents who say that Indiana’s heavily Republican power structure and Donald Trump’s federal government feel no sense of urgency to rescue a city that is mostly African American.

“This isn’t a problem that started with the storm,” the hip-hop star Freddie Gibbs, who grew up in Gary, told MS Now on Monday night. “We are a predominately Black city that tends to get ignored.” It feels like Katrina redux — an island of utter despair in the world’s wealthiest nation, with a government’s inaction bordering on criminal neglect. But there is one big difference; this festering crisis has been mostly ignored by the national media. The tragedy isn’t just our inability to stop the next Katrina, but our inability to care.

One of George Orwell’s greatest passages in 1984 concerns Winston Smith’s job of cutting out old newspaper articles and tossing them into “the memory hole” — inconvenient truths meant to be forgotten by civilization. That’s how it feels now reading news stories from those four years in the early 2020s when Donald Trump was out of power and America took baby steps back toward normalcy that would later get crushed. On Aug. 25, 2022, I wrote about one of these: Joe Biden’s eventually failed plan to wipe out some $300 billion of the nation’s massive student loan debt. I wrote that “this week will be remembered as one giant leap toward an idea that can change everything — the notion that higher education should be a public good, not the privatized rat race that has demoralized our rising generations.” Dive into the memory hole to pull out: “Biden’s big move on student loans only a first step toward making American college great again.”

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