Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Trump’s Night at the Garden: Racist Campaign Rally Evokes Infamous 1939 Nazi Gathering in NYC
Trump’s Night at the Garden: Racist Campaign Rally Evokes Infamous 1939 Nazi Gathering in NYC | Democracy Now!
"We take a close look at Donald Trump’s campaign and racist rally at Madison Square Garden with filmmaker Marshall Curry, who attended the rally and also directed the short film A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and notes, “The demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today.”
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this discussion Marshall Curry. Marshall Curry went to the Madison Square Garden event, but he also did an Oscar-nominated film. That film was called A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. This is a clip.
FRITZ KUHN: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, American patriots, I am sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail. We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.
If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social, just, white, gentile-ruled United States. Second, gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish, Moscow-directed domination.
AMY GOODMAN: A Night at the Garden. That was an excerpt not of Nazi Germany, but of a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, from the Academy Award-nominated short film directed by Marshall Curry. That voice, explain what we just saw and listened to, and the person, the protester, who came up and was beaten up.
MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. So, in 1939, there was a rally in Madison Square Garden where 20,000 New Yorkers gathered to celebrate the rise of Nazism. And when I first saw that footage, I was completely shocked to see the American flag and George Washington and, you know, hear people singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then offering a stiff-armed salute and cheering white supremacy.
So, the man who was speaking was named Fritz Kuhn. He was the head of the German American Bund, which had camps all around the country, had quite a big following and some significant power. The protester who runs out on stage and is beaten up was a man named Isadore Greenbaum, who was a Jewish plumber’s assistant who just went to the rally that night to find out what was going on, and was shocked and appalled by what he saw.
AMY GOODMAN: And you went to Madison Square Garden Sunday?
MARSHALL CURRY: I did. So, I made this film seven years ago out of archival material that we sort of found in the National Archive and UCLA’s archive and Grinberg Archive. And that was, you know, seven years ago, at the beginning of Trump’s administration. I saw some similarities between some of the demagoguery that was happening on stage in 1939 and what Trump was doing at his rallies. And so — but I had never actually seen a Trump rally personally. And so, when I heard that he was going to be at Madison Square Garden, I thought I needed to go and see it for myself.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Marshall Curry, as you mentioned your surprise, many Americans are not aware of how extensive the fascist and Nazi movement was in the U.S. back in those days. Could you talk about that?
MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. I mean, when I grew up, I always learned in school that America took on the fascists and we fought the Nazis and defeated them. And we did, and that’s a great, you know, point of pride for our country. But we were not entirely united. As today, there were people in our midst who were antisemites, who were anti-immigrant.
And I think the thing that struck me the most about seeing that footage was the way that the demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today. You know, they use this kind of dark humor. They wrap their ideology in the symbols of patriotism, and they go after immigrants and the press and minority religions. And they do it to distract people from the fact that they really want to cut taxes for rich people and take away healthcare and do policies that people wouldn’t support.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, this Madison Square rally has happened numerous times in U.S. history. People forget that in 1968, when George Wallace, the white supremacist governor, was running for president, he held a rally at Madison Square Garden in October of 1968. And it was filled, as well, with segregationists from right here in New York City. And in fact, the police were picking up people in the streets, anyone who was trying to protest the Wallace rally. I know because I was a young college student at the time trying to get down to Madison Square Garden, was picked up by the police blocks away from Madison Square Garden, and we were held in vans until after the rally was over, hundreds of people. The reality is that filling Madison Square Garden is really not that hard for a political movement. You’re talking about less than — in a metropolitan area of 20 million people, being able to get 20,000 zealots in an arena is basically two-tenths of 1% of the population.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yes. And the other thing is that this rally, all the different strains of it, playing “Dixie,” this Trump rally, you know, Trump has always provided a big tent, from the very beginning, 2015, ’16, for every possible kind of racist and extremist in America. He addressed himself to Southern racists, people who — he addressed himself to Proud Boys, to neo-Nazis, famously, at the Charlottesville rally — every type of person with a grievance, and then enlarged that with espousing great replacement theory, and, of course, in partnership with Fox, with the GOP elite, etc.
And so, all of this was represented at this rally, together with people from the fields of business, like the businessman Grant Cardone, who said, “We have to slaughter these people,” referring to people who aren’t supporting Trump. And you had people from the world of entertainment and from sports. And so, Madison Square Garden, you know, a seat of spectacles and sports spectacles, entertainment spectacles, political spectacles, was the perfect place, actually, for MAGA to show how many people are fitting into its big tent of racism and extremism.
AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, we want to thank you for being with us, expert on fascism and authoritarianism, wrote the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Her newsletter is called Lucid, on threats to democracy. And we want to thank Marshall Curry, director of the Oscar-nominated short film A Night at the Garden about the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
When we come back, as billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defends his decision to block the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris, we’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Post reporter David Hoffman, who’s resigned from the Post editorial board in protest, and with Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza. She resigned after the L.A. Times billionaire owner also blocked the board’s endorsement of Harris. Back in 20 seconds."
Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The Message”. An excellent book analyzing the parallel between various forms of European Colonialism in America and Palestine
Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The Message”.
“ 1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.
“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press
“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes listeners along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.”
Trump Team Fears Damage From Racist Rally Remarks
Trump Team Fears Damage From Racist Rally Remarks
(These were Trump’s hand picked racist speakers speaking a message that i have heard trumpet since the early 1970’s when he and his father were sued for racism in renting apartments to Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Trump and his speakers are savages, plain and simple)
“The Trump campaign issued a rare statement distancing itself from a comedian’s offensive joke about Puerto Rico at his rally on Sunday, a sign that it was concerned about losing crucial votes.
Donald J. Trump and his allies are full of bravado over his chances of victory in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. But there are signs, publicly and privately, that the former president and his team are worried that their opponents’ descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist may be breaking through to segments of voters.
That anxiety was clear after Mr. Trump’s six-hour event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, where the inflammatory speeches on Sunday included an opening act by a comedian known for a history of racist jokes who derided Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and talked about Black people carving watermelons.
The backlash among Puerto Rican celebrities and performers was instantaneous across social media, prompting the Trump campaign to issue a rare defensive statement distancing themselves from offensive comments. In a tight race, any constituency could be decisive and the sizable Puerto Rican community in the battleground state of Pennsylvania was on the minds of Trump allies.
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the Puerto Rico joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
The Trump ethos has generally been to never apologize, never admit error and try to ignore controversy. Ms. Alvarez’s statement was a rare break from that practice, reflecting a new concern that Mr. Trump risks reminding undecided voters of the dark tenor of his political movement in the closing stage of the 2024 race.
Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, seeming to harbor similar misgivings, were quick to criticize the joke and the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who made it.
David Urban, an informal Trump adviser with long ties to Pennsylvania, where there are large numbers of Puerto Rican voters, posted on X: “I thought he was unfunny and unfortunately offended many of our friends from Puerto Rico,” adding the hashtag “#TrumpLovesPR.”
The pushback also came from officials in Florida, where Mr. Trump’s campaign is based and some of his advisers have spent their careers.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida posted on X on Sunday: “It’s not funny and it’s not true.” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, of South Florida, condemned Mr. Hinchcliffe’s comments and said she was “disgusted,” adding that it did not reflect Republican values.
“Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted on X on Monday. But he also made a point to note that “those weren’t Trump’s words. They were jokes by an insult comic who offends.”
Beyond the rally backlash, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, the retired four-star Marine general John F. Kelly, has brought new attention to Mr. Trump’s past remarks and behavior. He described his former boss as a fascist and claimed that Mr. Trump made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler.
At the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta on Monday night, Mr. Trump exaggerated and misstated the criticism, falsely claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris had said that everyone who doesn’t vote for her is “a Nazi.” He talked about his father, Fred Trump, whose parents were German, and claimed his father had told him, “Never use the word Nazi. Never use that word,” and “Never use the word Hitler.”
Mr. Trump, who has accused President Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to Nazi Germany’s secret police, added, “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.” He told the rally crowd on Monday, “She’s a fascist, OK? She’s a fascist.”
Asked to comment on appearing concerned that the attacks on Mr. Trump could sink in with voters, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, did not address the question. Instead, she said, “Due to President Trump’s plans to cut taxes, end inflation, and stop the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border, he has more support from the Hispanic American community than any Republican in recent history.”
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, dismissed any concerns. “Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke, as you said,” he told reporters on Monday. “Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it.” But, he added, “we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.”
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has specialized in mobilizing Latino voters, asked publicly on Sunday for $30,000 in small donations to a PAC so he could send the video of the offensive comments to Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania.
By Monday morning, he had met the goal and had sent a blitz of 250,000 texts with 15 seconds of the comedian’s set disparaging the island.
“Puerto Ricans have a unique affinity for their homeland,” Mr. Rocha said. “When you attack the island, it cuts so deep with the community.”
Ms. Harris seized on the remarks, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning that Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden offered fresh evidence of the former president’s divisiveness. Mr. Trump, she said, “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him.”
Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is preparing to deliver a speech at the Ellipse near the White House that’s being cast as the closing argument of her three-month campaign, after she replaced President Biden on the ticket. It is the same spot where Mr. Trump delivered a speech to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, calling on Congress to reject President Biden’s electoral college votes. Hundreds of those supporters then marched to the Capitol and violently disrupted the certification.
Mr. Trump’s current extended orbit is a mash-up of longtime political veterans, down-ballot elected officials and operatives who embrace the New Right view that the country is in an existential battle internally and that the ends justify their means for victory.
Most on the Trump team believe the attacks on Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the fighting over whether he is racist cover ground that is already known by an electorate that has become numb to Mr. Trump’s provocations and threats to weaponize government.
His advisers and close allies have marveled privately that nothing has appeared to harm Mr. Trump so far politically, and it has given many a sense of invincibility about what he can get away with. And they think in a fragmented media environment in which nontraditional outlets have enormous sway, such headlines and stories matter less than they once did.
Some of them also view Sunday’s rally as a success, arguing that Mr. Trump’s filling an arena in deep blue Manhattan offered a demonstration of his political strength to voters around the country.
But few of Mr. Trump’s own events contained the kind of overt racism and misogyny the Madison Square Garden rally did.
“She’s a fake — I’m not here to invalidate her — she’s a fake, a fraud, she’s a pretender,” Grant Cardone, a businessman and internet figure, told the crowd. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”
And some of Mr. Trump’s own close allies privately expressed concern that the headlines about the event came at a problematic moment, when the small group of persuadable voters across the country is tuning in to the election, and that it was a needless risk when people are already casting ballots during early voting in many states.
There have been other moments suggesting the Trump team has concerns.
While Mr. Trump’s allies often publicly insist that voters have tuned out warnings about Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism, there were clear signs the Trump campaign was concerned about the statements from Mr. Kelly. Mr. Trump and others who worked for him have denied Mr. Kelly’s accusations.
The Trump team mobilized at full force to rebut Mr. Kelly — indicating they feared the attacks could appeal to the roughly five percent of voters they assess as undecided — in the lead-up to the Madison Square Garden rally.
After Ms. Harris called Mr. Trump a fascist, his campaign released a video featuring a Holocaust survivor, Jerry Wartski, who rejected comparisons of Mr. Trump to Hitler and demanded that Ms. Harris apologize. Mr. Wartski also attended Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where several speakers tackled accusations about his character head on.
Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend, said from the stage that Mr. Trump respected all faiths and that “accusations of extremism, they couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Sid Rosenberg, a New York talk radio host, responded to Hillary Clinton likening Mr. Trump’s event to a pro-Hitler rally from 1939. Mr. Rosenberg joked that it was “out of character for me to speak at a Nazi rally, I was just in Israel.” He said that a vote for Mr. Trump was a vote for an administration “that cares about the Jewish people,” while calling Democrats “Jew-haters.” Hulk Hogan, more simply, looked at the crowd and said, “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”
Mr. Trump himself also tried to signal his strength with diverse groups, citing that Jews, Muslims and Catholics alike were all lining up behind him. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” he said.
Perhaps most striking was the joint statement issued days before the rally by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling on Ms. Harris to stop calling Mr. Trump a fascist. It accused her of inflaming political tensions, ignoring Mr. Trump’s history of demonizing his own opponents.
Mr. McConnell’s presence on that statement was especially notable.
Despite his endorsement of Mr. Trump months ago, Mr. McConnell told his biographer Michael Tackett that he hoped the former president “would pay a price” for his role in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. According to Mr. Tackett’s biography, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Trump “erratic” and said that American voters chose wisely in voting him out of office. He also said he viewed Mr. Trump’s actions in connection with Jan. 6 to be “as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine,” though he did not vote to convict him in an impeachment trial and said the criminal justice system would be the place to address it.
Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.More about Michael Gold“
Monday, October 28, 2024
Elon Musk is sharing some details about his immigration path. Experts say they still have questions
Elon Musk is sharing some details about his immigration path. Experts say they still have questions
CNN —
“It’s rare to hear Elon Musk discuss the details of his own immigration journey.
But the billionaire tech tycoon opened up about some of it over the weekend in a series of posts on the platform he owns, X, hours after the Washington Post reported that Musk began his career working illegally in the US when he was building a Silicon Valley startup in the 1990s.
The newspaper’s story cited court records, company documents and former business associates, including a past CEO of the company who said investors had worried that Musk could be deported.
Musk hasn’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on the report. He also hasn’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment about remarks he once made describing his past immigration status as a “gray area.”
In a post on X, where video circulated of President Biden referencing the Washington Post report’s claims, Musk denied that he’d worked without authorization.
“I was in fact allowed to work in the US,” Musk wrote, accusing Biden of lying.
The newspaper’s report and Biden’s remarks circulated widely among critics of Musk, some of whom accused the world’s richest man of having a double standard given how much time he’s devoted to slamming illegal immigration in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.
Supporters of Musk, including Tesla fan accounts, also swiftly rose to his defense and criticized Biden.
In response to one such post, Musk described two visas he once had — offering more detail than he’d previously shared publicly.
“I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B,” Musk wrote. “They know this, as they have all my records. Losing the election is making them desperate.”
But experts told CNN those details raise additional questions Musk hasn’t answered.
The J-1 visa is for exchange visitors and can be used for foreign students to pursue academic training or research. It requires a sponsoring program, such as a university. An H-1B is a temporary employment visa for specialty occupations.
Why Musk’s student status matters
Musk didn’t detail what institution sponsored his J-1 visa, or which years he had the visa.
Musk was born in South Africa, obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother and came to the US to study at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He became a US citizen a decade later, according to biographies of the billionaire.
He has said in the past that after leaving Penn he had planned to pursue graduate studies at Stanford, but dropped out to work on founding his first company.
That’s significant, experts say, because there are strict rules about the kind of work allowed when someone is in the US on a student visa, and work authorizations tied to student visas generally require someone to be actively studying or for the sponsoring institution to allow the student to get academic or practical training after graduation.
Immigration attorney Greg Siskind, who’s co-authored multiple editions of a guide to J-1 visas, says transitioning from a J-1 visa to an H-1B visa is a possible path. But he says a J-1 visa wouldn’t provide work authorization to someone who dropped out of a degree program. The moment Musk dropped out, he would have lost his status and been unauthorized to work, Siskind says.
“Musk would have needed to be engaged in a full course of study (at least 12 academic hours a semester) in order to qualify for work while being a J-1 student,” Siskind wrote on X.
A Stanford spokeswoman told CNN last month that the university had no record Musk had ever enrolled there, but that he had been accepted into the school’s Materials Science and Engineering graduate program. Asked if Musk ever had a student visa connected with the university, the spokeswoman said she did not know because further documentation was unavailable.
What if Musk’s visa was obtained through the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied as an undergraduate?
The same criteria would apply, Siskind says.
And given Musk’s background, Siskind says it’s unlikely he would have been eligible for humanitarian exceptions sometimes granted to allow off-campus work due to economic hardship.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck says Musk stating that he had a J-1 visa makes it clear he worked illegally, given the restrictions that would have only allowed work in connection with his academic program.
“So clearly, he’s admitting now that in fact, he did work illegally and violate his status. The only question is at that point, what did he do to fix his status violation?” Kuck says.
Working illegally isn’t a crime, Kuck says, but having done so would require certain steps to be taken to return to a legal immigration status.
Key unanswered questions, Kuck says, are what steps Musk took to get his H-1B visa, and when that occurred.
Musk graduated from Penn in May 1997, according to a university spokesman. Biographies of the SpaceX and Tesla CEO indicate he finished his studies there in 1995.
According to the Post’s report, a 1996 funding agreement with venture capitalists who’d agreed to contribute $3 million to Musk’s first company “stated that the Musk brothers and an associate had 45 days to obtain legal work status. Otherwise, the firm could reclaim its investment.” Musk had told coworkers that he was in the country on a student visa, six former associates and shareholders in the company told the Post.
“Student visas are some of the most complicated visas out there, and work related to them is also extraordinarily complicated. And to dismiss it in a in a two-line tweet, ‘Well I had a J-1 and it went to H-1B,’ yeah, trust me, there’s always a lot more to it than that,” Kuck says.
What the world’s richest man has said about his immigration journey
Musk is an increasingly powerful force shaping and amplifying conversations around immigration — especially since his 2022 takeover of Twitter, now known as X, and given his huge audience on the platform.
His more than 200 million followers on X frequently see him sharing posts endorsing conspiracy theories that claim the Biden administration has deliberately allowed undocumented immigrants to cross the border to gain political advantage. It’s also common to see posts referring to his own background as an immigrant and advocating for increased legal immigration to the US.
In response to details his mother, Maye Musk, has shared on X about her own immigration journey, Elon Musk has called legal immigration to the US “a laborious Kafkaesque nightmare” and noted that becoming a US citizen “was extremely difficult and took over a decade.”
But he’s offered few specifics about his immigration status in the early days of his career, when he and his brother were founding their early online city guide and mapping tool that was later dubbed Zip2.
His brother, Kimbal Musk, has repeatedly stated that early investors in their company soon learned they were “illegal immigrants,” but Elon Musk has disputed his brother’s characterization.
“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon Musk said at a 2013 event.
And in a 2020 podcast interview, Elon Musk said he had a “student work visa” at the time.
Watch the Musk brothers discuss their immigration journey
01:55 - Source: CNN
“Student work visa” is not an official term, and experts told CNN last month that it’s impossible to know Musk’s immigration path without access to the paper trail in his government file.
It’s likely regulations weren’t enforced as strictly during Musk’s time as a student, according to Hunter Swanson, associate director of the Center for International Education at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Enforcement of student visa restrictions, and the systems officials use to monitor compliance, intensified dramatically after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Swanson told CNN earlier this year. Some of the hijackers involved in the attacks were in the U.S. on student visas, according to the official 9/11 Commission Report.
“It definitely wouldn’t be possible to do academic training now on a J-1 Visa if you dropped out in your first term,” Swanson said in an email Sunday.
What’s the importance of digging into Musk’s own immigration history?
“For me, it’s the hypocrisy,” Siskind says. ”He’s been fixated on illegal immigration in the last year. And you know, he should be empathetic to the people who are struggling with the immigration system.”
'Washington Post' flooded by cancellations after Bezos' non-endorsement decision : NPR
Over 200,000 subscribers flee 'Washington Post' after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked The Washington Post from endorsing a presidential candidate less than two weeks before Election Day. The editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris.
"The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.'s status as a privately held company.
“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”
Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”
Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump. Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment.
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. “This gave people a reason to act on this mood.”
Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.
“It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,” he said. “There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post’s journalists is among the best in the world.”
Even at the rival New York Times, with a much higher circulation level, a significant protest might register in the low thousands. Earlier this year, Lewis, the publisher, had touted the paper's net gain of 4,000 subscribers as noteworthy.
Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post’s website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos’ decision. The top one was humor columnist Alexandra Petri’s piece, headlined, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” More than 174,000 people read it online.
The decision by Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, was first reported by NPR on Friday. In the days since, two columnists have resigned from the paper and two writers have stepped down from the editorial board.
“For decades, the Washington Post's editorials have been a beacon of light, signaling hope to dissidents, political prisoners and the voiceless,” David Hoffman wrote in a letter Monday explaining his decision to leave the editorial board. “When victims of repression were harassed, exiled, imprisoned and murdered, we made sure the whole world knew the truth.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman added in his letter to Editorial Page Editor David Shipley, which was obtained by NPR. “ I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice."
Hoffman says he intends to remain at the paper, saying he "refuses to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42 years." He writes of being launched on several projects, including "the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world."
Hoffman accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on Thursday, the day before Bezos’ decision was made public. Pulitzer judges recognized him “for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age, and how they can be fought.”
On Friday evening on CNN, former columnist Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, explained his decisionto resign from the paper. “We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we're afraid of what he will do,” Kagan said, noting that officials from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.
Blue Origin has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract with the Pentagon over the then-president’s ire about coverage in the Post, which Bezos owns personally.
Bezos brought in Will Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.
Lewis had been editor of the Telegraph in the U.K., which is considered closely allied with the right wing of the Conservative party. He served as a top executive in London for Rupert Murdoch and became publisher and chief executive of his most prestigious title, the Wall Street Journal. After departing, he briefly became a consultant for the Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
On Monday, Shipley held a contentious meeting Monday with scores of opinion section staffers, who posed tough questions to the editorial page chief, including appeals for Bezos to address them.
As recently as last week, according to a person present, Shipley said he sought to talk Bezos out of his decision. Shipley added, “I failed.”
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