This Revolution Is Not Being Televised

Canada, China, Gaza, Greenland, immigration and birthright citizenship, OPM, Mexico, Musk, Panama, transgender rights, Treasury, USAID — there are so many fires burning across our federal government right now that it feels almost impossible to keep track of them all. That is intentional. The goal of this current administration is to confuse and overwhelm and move so fast that things slip through the cracks and become the norm before any entity or individual can mount a meaningful challenge. It is the exact strategy former Trump strategist Steve Bannon outlined years ago in an interview with journalist Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

It is not a strategy without weakness, as Ezra Klein recently pointed out in his latest op-ed for the New York Times. (Klein can be a bit of a hack, but every once in a while he hits the nail perfectly on the head.) If your goal is to keep the news cycle in perpetual motion in the hopes of disorienting journalists and American citizens alike, that makes you responsible for creating and running any number of controversial — or in recent weeks blatantly illegal — public opinion campaigns at the same time. And that overreach is unsustainable, should your opponents find a way to weather the immediate storm. It doesn’t matter how carefully you watch your steps; take too many of them and sooner or later you'll land in shit.

In the interim, and while the billionaire-bought mainstream media continues to bleed integrity and abdicate its responsibility to actually provide context and truth for the general public, there is an entire cadre of independent journalists and reporters and writers publishing extremely candid and important work to hold Musk and Trump accountable for their behavior. Here are some of them.

If you’re not already on Bluesky, it is well worth joining. Especially for those who actually used to rely on Twitter for breaking news and information before it became a cesspool of right-wing radicalism, Bluesky is an invaluable way to connect directly with journalists and politicians and the leaders of some of the organizations doing critical work right now (e.g., Leah Greenberg of Indivisible). And yes, I know I just recommended an entire platform instead of the individuals and/or outlets I promised. Sue me.

In a surprise turn of events, WIRED has quickly become an excellent source for breaking political news. They’ve broken a few stories now — including the news that Musk is relying on a private team of young men to literally hack government software, and this one about “Big Balls” having access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data (likely including yours), and also this one about the now-disgraced Marko Elez having write access to the federal payment system despite the White House assuring reporters it was read-only.

POLITICO’s Playbook has long been a go-to newsletter for political junkies, policymakers, and really just anyone interested in the “insider baseball” of how Washington works. Which now, I think we all could be. I will warn that this is a daily newsletter delivered in the morning and is often so long that it gets clipped and you have to click a link to finish reading it, but if you have the time and willpower, it is easily one of the best ways to stay abreast of everything happening.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas publishes The Handbasket, a newsletter that in recent weeks has turned its attention to issues of constitutionality and democracy. Kabas’ stories have broken enough news and provided enough insight into White House activities that established outfits like Business Insider, which ran a recent feature on her work, have noticed them.

Democracy Forward is one of the organizations spearheading the recently launched Democracy 2025 initiative, which includes a response center that provides real-time tracking of Trump-Vance administration actions and related legal challenges.

I just noticed while looking at their website for this piece that Court Watch ran a headline last week that was “Court Watch #111: The Court Revolution Will Be Televised.” Clearly I am not as original as I’d thought. Court Watch is honestly not your best bet for staying on top of news — Democracy Forward is doing the same thing in a much more visually pleasing way, which sounds trite but is actually meaningful — but they have at least collected all of the lawsuits related to Trump administration executive orders in one place, which is handy.

I don’t even know where to start with ProPublica, which has been around for almost two decades but has only really made a splash on the national level in recent years. Actually they may have won a Pulitzer in 2010, but they definitely haven’t done a great job of staying relevant to the general public, because I’d forgotten they existed until they started exposing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his various misdeeds. ProPublica says it is “investigative journalism in the public interest” which is all you can really ask for these days, right?

The Brennan Center for Justice is my sleeper pick here. They’re run out of the NYU School of Law, and even though AllSides has them at “Lean Left” I would recommend subscribing to their newsletter anyway. If you need to make a just-the-facts legal argument explaining the problems with how Musk and Trump are going about seizing control of the federal government, this is not a bad place to start building your case.

For my friends in the area, 730DC has been pretty good about flagging upcoming demonstrations and protests in the DMV (DC-Maryland-Virginia for my non-local followers). It isn’t an expressly political newsletter, but as is true for most DC-based entities, it doesn’t shy away from the scene either. Also good for finding out about community events and concerts and such, if you like that kind of stuff. 

I am lastly going to take this opportunity to plug Vanishing Points. I could not tell you for the life of me who Lolo is beyond what he shares in his emails and on social media, but he is a fantastic writer, and you should all go sign up for his newsletter immediately. Vanishing Points isn’t political at all — it is theoretically about “the overlooked, the fleeting, and the intersections of memory, identity, and social change” — but the last few essays and stories that I have received have each occupied my mind for literal weeks at a time. And it’s nice to take a break from thinking about how we’re all going to die every now and then.

In other news, I’ve decided to try a new approach with this newsletter. I think it’ll keep me more consistent than I’ve been, and also just give me more freedom and space to do what I want with the platform. You might have noticed that this piece has seemed a little more casual and cavalier than normal; a little more acidic — that is intentional, and I hope that it makes things more interesting for everyone involved. I’m still going to copyedit and spellcheck my work, and you will doubtless continue to receive long-form essays every now and then, but as part of this broader experiment I’m running. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll go back to the way I ran things before.

Oh, also: One of my friends just bought a gun. I hope he never uses it. I'm not sure if this is a metaphor, but if not then it's the next best thing.