Corporate media asks only one (Jewish) Republican about "Shylock" in the ongoing process of normalizing MAGA

 This is my Google News feed for President Trump's use of "shylock" in a speech the other day:

In addition, I looked at twenty-two other major media sources, domestic and international, and I discovered two key items about the coverage:

ONE: With the exception of Mediate askng Jewish GOP Representative David Kustoff about it, there is no evidence that ANY reporter for any corporate media posed this question to any Republican leader. One suspects that some reporters already knew they wouldn't get a real answer, because no Republican politician in his, her, or their right mind would criticize The Boss. They are probably correct, but let's look at it from a different perspective: this means that the corporate media has effectively (and more or less permanently) surrendered on the issue of holding President Trump accountable for what he says that is racist, sexist, etc. IF the ADL and the Jewish Telegraph Agency and others had not pushed back, there would have been no story.

Even allowing for President Trump's many other anti-semitic references.

For the sake of completeness and the vicarious enjoyment of watching someone justifiably twisting in the wind, here was Kustoff's reply and rejoinder with Mediate:

So this apparently means that the Republican standard is that if I claim I did not know that n*gger, ch*nk, ret*rd, or c*nt were slurs, I get to keep using them until somebody complains.

Got it.

TWO: President Trump never apologized for using the term. You'd almost miss that because nearly every single media focuses on his patently transparently lying denial:

No apology. No "If I'd known it mean that I'd obvious never have used the word" or "I'm sorry if my ignorance of the real meaning of the term upset anyone."

This is, of course, par for the course for authoritarian leaders: they can never be wrong, and they never apologize. "You view it differently" is as good as it gets.

By the way, how do I know the President is lying when he says he never heard of it?

Because Trump's official campaign Twitter/X account brought it up during the 2020 election that Joe Biden had also used the term in 2014:

And, of course, to those who view the President's relationship with Judaism, Jews, and Israel as purely transactional, it doesn't matter, as this rare moment of truth shows:

In Podhoretz's mind, as long as the President bombs Iran he can also sit down to dinner with Ye seven days a week, and pardon insurrectionists wearing pro-Auschwitz t-shirts as often as he wants.

Strangely -- or perhaps not so strangely -- the same media that did not question Republicans about the issue did not mention anywhere that President Trump never apologized.

This is what I mean about normalizing the Trump administration -- more and more each day the corporate media covers the stories the way MAGA wants them to be covered.

An final probative example: recently, the New York Times permitted an anonymous author to publish a hit-piece on Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic NYC mayoral candidate. Aside from the anonymity of the author, the Times permitted publication of hacked material about Mamdani's college application which is decidedly odd from a newspaper that previously -- and piously -- refused to print a story derived from hacked records about Donald Trump.

The double standard, as Newsweek reports, is palpable and longstanding:

The Times' only pathetic defense of this was that they didn't do the hacking, wouldn't do such a thing -- but that they would print the results when somebody else did the things they wouldn't do, and that they would cover up the identity of the author who is, as noted above, "an admitted race scientist/eugenicist" in order to give their readers ... "more context" ... about Zohran Mamdani:

It's becoming pretty clear that we might as well merge the New York Times with the New York Post. The Post, at least, doesn't try to disguise its ideological leanings.

That's where we are today with respect to the corporate media ...

If you know a service member, listen to their fears ... but send them to the GI Rights Hotline instead of giving advice

 

According to TruthOut, calls to the GI Rights Hotline spiked by 94% in June 2025 over the previous year, driven primarily by fears of a politicized military being put into action against American citizens.

From the story:

“Overall callers have shared serious concerns that the president is moving the country away from a representative democracy altogether,” [Hotline counselor Steve] Woolford told Truthout in an email. “These callers believe that the military will determine what the United States becomes by deciding which side to follow. For them, having service members refuse to turn their backs on the constitution is the safeguard against martial law and dictatorship.” …

U.S. Air Force airman Juan Bettancourt said his colleagues in the armed forces have expressed similar concerns. Bettancourt is expressing his own views and not speaking on behalf of the military or the Department of Defense.

“They are absolutely petrified of being put in a position in which they are the vehicle to advance further authoritarianism, and the proto-fascism that we’re seeing,” Bettancourt told Truthout. “There is absolutely that fear that they’re going to be the pawns in this chess game that brings about the further expansion of authoritarianism.”

Bettancourt said some service members fear the military will become Trump’s domestic police force, potentially in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. He says this is a particularly fraught prospect for Latino personnel, who could be deployed to carry out Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Thousands of immigrants enlist in the military each year. In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalized more than 16,000 service members — a 34 percent increase from the previous year. Of those naturalized between fiscal years 2020 and 2024, the top five countries of origin were the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, and Ghana.

“They feel they’re betraying themselves,” said Bettancourt, himself an immigrant from Colombia.

Here's the graphic with the number for the GI Rights Hotline, but you really need to visit the page for full information:

If you know someone on active duty or in the reserve components, and they are expressing reservations about the current administration's use of troops on American soil and what they should do about it if bothered by their conscience, here are three pieces of advice I feel quite confidant in giving:

ONE: Listen rather than talk, and keep your mouth shut about anything you hear. It's great that a service member trusts you enough to tell you about their doubts and fears, and possibly even actions they may be thinking about taking in acting on those doubts and fears, BUT ...

... you have know idea how talking to ANYBODY else can potentially get that service member into a whole world of hurt.

TWO: If they ask you for advice -- and my answer here is the same for you if you are a veteran or know nothing about the military at all -- here's what you do: Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline. These folks (and their attorneys) are TRAINED to know what they can and cannot say, and how to give service members legally sound advice on what to do next. DO NOT GIVE THEM ADVICE OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD, or tell them something you read on the internet. I say again: tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

THREE: Forget you ever had this conversation unless the service member voluntarily comes back to you again. I know that in some ways this is just a restatement of Item #1, but let's be really clear here: there are dozens of ways that things you say about them, or to them, can get them into deep shit, and I don't care if you are a parent, sibling, spouse, pastor, therapist, or even a civilian attorney, you do not know enough of about those dozens of ways to get into trouble to give them advice.

Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

I know this is unsatisfying and you WANT to help them.

I don't care. I have worked, inside the military, with issues like this, and "My Dad told me I should ..." or "My girlfriend thinks I need to ..." or even "A veteran told me the way to do it is ..." ARE ALWAYS TROUBLE for the service member.

Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

Please.

It isn't just US Tent: here are the contractors building Alligator Auschwitz -- and their contact info

Do you believe in public accountability?

Then here is the list, courtesy of the Tampa Bay Times (I added the contact information)

CDR Maguire and its affiliated company, CDR Health

Doodie Calls

Garda World

Garner Environmental Services

Gothams LLC

Granny's Alliance

Longview International Technology Solutions

US Tent Rental

PLEASE use contact information responsibly to register your disapproval of the company's involvement, to spread this information to other people involved in resisting mass deportation, to any mutual funds or retirement funds that might want to divest themselves of these companies ...

PLEASE DO NOT dox any individuals, send threats, or perform any illegal activities with this FREELY AVAILABLE INFORMATION gleaned from their PUBLIC WEBSITES.

The Delmarva Times: A case study in the local cultivation of extremism and the appetite for mass murder

 

In Delaware, despite being among the bluest of blue states, we have had our experiences with the active cultivation of a far right population that uses increasingly violent and even exterminationist rhetoric.

Certainly the Delaware Republican Party has done its bit for pushing politics as hard to the right as possible, which is exceptionally odd given that the long tradition of the First State's GOP had long been one of bipartisan centrism under the likes of Governor and later US Representative Mike Castle.

But in 2010 Castle lost his US Senate primary to upstart right-winger Christine O'Donnell, whose most famous moments came from (believe it or not) denying she was a witch and demanding in a debate with her Democratic opponent, "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" (She lost in a landslide to Chris Coons.

The DE GOP has gone down hill so fast that large Democratic majorities control both houses of the General Assembly, and the Democratic primary for Governor, Mayor of Wilmington, and about half of the seats in the General Assembly effectively IS the election. They have so badly lost that one GOP State Representative wrote a highly publicized editorial bemoaning the "tyranny of the majority" that has blighted the state with "one-party rule" through the horrible mechanism of ... Democrats winning elections:

Elections have consequences, and the choices made by individual voters over years have created a monoculture of thought and action in the state Legislature. Delaware House and Senate Democrats can already pass any bill requiring a simple majority vote, without the need for any participation by Republican lawmakers. As a result, too many such bills fail to incorporate any perspective not shared by the majority.

Then this year there was the rather bizarre stunt of inviting the GOP poster girl for transphobic hate, Representative Nancy "Tranny, tranny, tranny" Mace, to visit Delaware and spew her hate about Representative Sarah McBride, the first-ever openly transgender Congresswoman, and one of Delaware's most popular politicians.

They've been reduced to running increasingly fringe candidates in a handful of safe districts, and by mimicking what has worked for Republicans nationwide: creating a network of bogus organizations (the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware Women's Self Defense Association, and others) and developing an alternative hard-right media presence. 

This media presence was built off the audience for some pre-existing right-wing talk shows (WMDT, etc.). We now have one statewide news site controlled by a conservative grocery chain owner, another regional paper owned by a GOP legislator, and ever-the-right-wing-upstart First State Update, literally produced by an incel in his basement (but people patronize it because he monitors police bands and usually manages to beat everybody online with reports of major traffic accidents or shootings). Given that we have no TV station in Delaware and our state "newspaper of record" is a Gannett publication, what sounds like a dribble of hard-core MAGA is actually much more.

Because we generally live in a world where national news -- even on the far right -- is dominated by a handful of major corporate players, we don't usually consider the impact of these local wannabes. Instead we talk about Fox News, One America, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, etc.

But I am increasingly becoming aware, as we listen to MAGA voters clamoring for ever more brutal behavior by the Trump regime, that we've missed a critical point here. These local far-right "news" sources are the first-line breeding ground for extremism.

Take The Delmarva Times, for example, which aspires to be "your premier destination for comprehensive news coverage of the Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset regions, as well as broader state-level developments in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia," and "to provide timely, accurate, and insightful journalism that serves the diverse communities of the Delmarva Peninsula."

An end to denial: President Trump and MAGA are serious about everything up to, and including, genocide ... here are the receipts

 

Here's my conundrum: How does Dr. Aviva Dautch, the Director and publisher of Jewish Renaissance, the leading Jewish arts magazine in the UK, understand what's happening here from across the Atlantic Ocean when tens of millions of people here who are not MAGA seem not to get it?

Also in the UK, George Orwell -- who has been fucking DEAD for 75 years -- still gets it from the grave: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Meanwhile, what do we have over here? This Newsweek headline from June 8 pretty much sums it up: "75 Democrats Express 'Gratitude' to ICE in Antisemitism Vote Amid LA Riots." Some day in the far future an alien cultural anthropologist examining the ruins of Earth, will turn one of she/he/it's heads toward a colleague and remark, "They had a term for this. They called it 'Stockholm Syndrome.' They just couldn't recognize it when it was happening, apparently."

It's particularly fascinating to find Jewish writers like Jeffrey Salkin just two days ago ("Not Every Struggle Requires a Nazi Metaphor," July 1, 2025) adamantly condemning the use of Nazi and Holocaust "metaphors" from some sort of bizarre moral high horse ridden without the slightest understanding that we are not now creating metaphors but MAKING DIRECT HISTORICAL COMPARISONS.

Here are two of Salkin's dumbest observations:

"Never Again": it turns out that "never" lasts 85 years, one month, and 18 days ...

 

It turns out that there are 6.5 million people alive in America today who would have been alive when the first mass transit of inmates arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940.

After that it required not quite fifteen months -- until September 3, 1941 -- for the first mass Zyklon B gassing of 600 prisoners to occur.

Officially, the Jews and Poles and others sent to Auschwitz were being "deported" from Germany into Poland for "labor."

"Never Again!" the world -- including the United States -- swore in 1945 when the full enormity of the Holocaust burst upon the armies liberating the death camps and concentration camps from East and West.

"Never Again."

It turns out that the definition of "Never" is 85 years, one month, and 18 days, as the first inmates -- immigrants supposedly being "deported" arrive at the Florida Everglades camp known affectionately to President Trump, Governor DeSantis, and all MAGA Republicans as "Alligator Alcatraz," but thought of by most actual human beings as "Alligator Auschwitz."

Curiously enough, amnesia over the parallels here seem rife. Searches for the facility on the Anti-Defamation League's website and that of the American Jewish Committee turn up nothing ...

On the other hand we can find this quite prominently posted at National Review:

Jeffrey Blehar -- officially the music critic at NR billing himself as "happy to find something non-political to talk about" -- makes the following fascinating statement (among a host of others) denying ANY connection between the mass deportations of the Trump administration and what happened in Germany throughout the 1930s leading up to that day in June 1940:

The Nation promptly denounced this as “abominable sadism” and as Trump’s “Alligator Auschwitz” — a comparison that deserves to be mocked but not addressed — 

Apparently nobody wants to talk at all in either the circles of the political elites or the corporate national media about such questions as "How long did it take for Nazi rhetoric to shift from denaturalization to deportation to not saying anything and just killing Jews by the millions?"

Two notes: 

ONE: The Nazi law providing for the revocation of citizenship for undesirables as the 1938 Projekt documents, occurred in July 1933 -- placing Trump and Hitler right on the same timetable since their ascensions to power:

The passage in July 1933 of a law allowing the government to revoke the citizenship of those naturalized after the end of WWI had given Nazi officials a tool to deprive “undesirables” of their citizenship. The law targeted the Nazis’ political adversaries as well as Jews; 16,000 Eastern European Jews had gained German citizenship between the proclamation of the republic on November 9, 1918 and the Nazi rise to power in January 1933.

TWO: The first official Nazi concentration camp -- Dachau -- opened in March 1933, but here Mr Trump had the advantage on Herr Shickelgruber: he inherited a system of privatized concentration camps from his predecessors, but with the assistance of Florida Governor DeSantis he managed to put his own flourish in the matter with "Alligator Alcatraz" by late June/early July. He is only about three months behind.

I know it's complicated right now. One must denounce antisemitism, which extends to all criticism of the Israeli Defense Force's operations in Gaza and anything presented in front of the International Criminal Court) while embracing Islamophobia. 

All pro-Palestinian protesters are terrorist sympathizers, and Zohran Mamdani -- chosen by NYC Democrats as their candidate for Mayor -- must not only be an antisemite, a terrorist supporter, a communist, and a socialist, but a target for denaturalization and deportation according not just to various MAGA Republican politicians but the President of the United States.

Alas, if only there were some historical situation that provided useful parallels. But, apparently, there is not.

I am left, really, with only one question, that Mr Blehar of the National Review will have to look up in order to understand the reference before he can mock it:

When will Tom Homan convene the Wannsee Conference? 

(Which, strangely enough, you CAN find on the ADL website, even if you can't find anything about American concentration camps in the Everglades.)

According to various timelines, and allowing for minor differences, the decision to liquidate all the illegals we cannot otherwise push out of the country or have eaten by alligators will come sometime in early 2026 ... just in time for the midterm elections.

Democrats will no doubt be divided on whether to view this decision as dangerous extremism worthy of a strong letter of protest or another opportunity for bipartisan cooperation.

"When you lay down with dogs, you will get fleas" -- US Tent Rental whines about backlash for contracting with Alligator Auschwitz

 

From the Herald Tribune:

Workers at Sarasota-based U.S. Tent Rental have received death threats and been doxxed after the company was tapped to provide food service for workers building "Alligator Alcatraz,” a controversial massive immigration detention site being constructed in the Everglades.

U.S. Tent Rental employees said that the company is being misrepresented on social media as a main player in the detention center's construction. A TikTok posted on June 24 showed trucks with the U.S. Tent Rental logo driving to the detention site, garnering over 1.3 million views. ...

"If we have to ask every client about their political standpoint or their views on different issues, we'll never be in business," an employee shared about criticism directed at the business. The employee did not give their name because of safety concerns.

U.S. Tent Rental has shut off its phones after receiving dozens of threats over the last few days. An employee said that the company has no responsibility for setting up the detention site and is only providing meals for workers.

The company mostly provides services for weddings and events, but in the past, it has helped set up COVID testing sites and provided disaster relief across Florida and the country, staging food stations for power workers and emergency responders.

U.S. Tent Rental has shut off its phones after receiving dozens of threats over the last few days. An employee said that the company has no responsibility for setting up the detention site and is only providing meals for workers. ...

The company mostly provides services for weddings and events, but in the past, it has helped set up COVID testing sites and provided disaster relief across Florida and the country, staging food stations for power workers and emergency responders. 

A U.S. Tent Rental salesperson, who declined to provide their name to Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporters, added that the company is “humanitarian” and is trying to ensure workers can have meals in an air-conditioned space.

“Everybody has it wrong,” the salesperson said. “Were we there? Yes, but not in that capacity.”

To be very clear: I am not a believer in death threats and I don't dox people's families.

On the other hand, all you have to do to understand why this is not "ask[ing] every client about their political standpoint or their views on different issues," just take that first paragraph and CHANGE ONE WORD:

Workers at Sarasota-based U.S. Tent Rental have received death threats and been doxxed after the company was tapped to provide food service for workers building "Alligator AUSCHWITZ,” a controversial massive immigration detention site being constructed in the Everglades.

It's pretty goddamn difficult to take the money to make sure that the people building a concentration camp in the Everglades "can have meals in an air-conditioned space" and not expect other people to have a problem with it.

Just ask Avelo Airlines, a struggling upstart that contracted to fly deportation flights to plump up a sagging bottom line ... and who's losing tax breaks in Connecticut while facing protests around the nation.

When the Connecticut AG's office asks you to verify that you "won’t operate deportation flights from any Connecticut airport and ... never operate flights with shackled children," and you blow them off ... that's how you lose your reputation AND your tax breaks.

We note, of course, that the national corporate media is mostly not covering these stories, any more than it is paying attention to the hugely successful Target boycott over DEI and LGBTQIA+.

Here's what the real message for businesses needs to be: MAKE A PROFIT OFF OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S RACIST DEPORTATION POLICY AND THERE ARE GOING TO BE CONSEQUENCES.