Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascists

Wild new polls, union power, media tragedy

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

I’ve been writing and rewriting a rant about how bizarre, scary, and irrational presidential elections feel in a country this large and morally bankrupt. Unfortunately, as an exasperated New Yorker who lives uptown, no matter what I do, it just winds up sounding like a Jerry Seinfeld impression. How can somebody still be undecided at this point? There is very clear difference between the two candidates!

Anyway, there is a whole lot of actual news to discuss, including polls, big voting rights decisions, history, abortion rights, and an enormous media scandal that will resonate far a long time to come.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Jeff Bezos’s cucked decision will have immense consequences for the news media

Trump allegedly pushed the Pentagon to award a $10 billion contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon, making this photo funny in hindsight

Before I began working for a nonprofit media outlet back in 2021, I spent a decade working in what I’d call the corporate media, which provided me some formative lessons. For example, I know from experience that when business needs and editorial independence are in tension with one another, it’s usually the business that comes out on top. In many cases, it’s hard to even notice, especially when the business and editorial voice (ie Fox News) are so aligned, which I’ve always seen as the most dangerous violation of editorial independence — at least until today.

It’s a high bar in an industry that still has Rupert Murdoch kicking around, but billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to scrap the editorial board’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris is in many ways the most egregious corporate violations of editorial independence and the dignity of the news business in many, many decades.

It’s unclear why he did it, but I’d guess it had something with Donald Trump’s habit of weaponizing government against his personal enemies. In 2019, Amazon sued the federal government, alleging that Trump, pissed off at Bezos and spiteful to the core, intervened to deny the company a $10 billion Pentagon contract. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin happened to meet with Trump today, was very likely trying to score points with the petty tyrant in case he wins next month’s election.

Bezos could have allowed his editorial board to warn Americans about the tyranny that Trump will pursue if he wins next month, but he decided to take the selfish route, protecting his own bottomless pockets. The incident itself isn’t exactly a surprise, but it will plant a bug in the minds of a public already distrustful of the media, living in their own algorithmic realities.

For years to come, readers will have reason to be skeptical of every report in the Post as well as its contemporaries (especially the Los Angeles Times, whose billionaire owner also squashed an endorsement this week). Corrupt politicians and corporate leaders whose antics are outed by hard-nosed journalists will point to this incident as proof that they are simply victims of a conspiracy run by shadowy media elites. Trump has already done this, but now the door has been opened to everybody.

This is one major reason why I’ve been going on and on about the importance of independent media, driven by reporters you know and trust. We’re in a new kind of gilded age, in which the egos and sociopathies of the ultra-wealthy tarnish everything they touch, without fear of consequences.

Yesterday it was revealed that Elon Musk has been having secret conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin for years now, raising the very real possibility that he has been feeding the autocrat all kinds of national security secrets. The US could revoke his top security clearance, but he is deeply enmeshed in the federal government; his companies have billions of dollars in contracts with the government to perform critical security and intelligence services, and he’s as hot-tempered and socially defunct as anybody you’ll ever meet.

Musk, who has redesigned Twitter to spread hate speech and misinformation, has also poured more than $100 million into getting Donald Trump re-elected president. He is impervious to any law; he ignored a letter from the Department of Justice warning him that his daily $1 million giveaway to induce voters to back Trump is likely illegal, and this year has decided that instead of reforming his egregious labor practices, he would simply sue to have the NLRB dismantled completely.

A new ABC/Ipsos poll released on Friday revealed that half of Americans think Donald Trump is a fascist, which makes the fact that he is dead even with Kamala Harris in the other polls all the more distressing. The poll used the modern definition of fascism, which focused on the individual autocrat and the suspension of civil rights, but it could have just as easily been referring to the vision of the man who coined the term, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

When he ascended to power in 1939, Mussolini dissolved government and installed a council of business leaders, reflecting the corporatist dimension of his ideology and cementing an alliance that held total control of Italian society. In 1944, former Vice President Henry Wallace wrote an essay in the New York Times envisioning an American strain of fascism, which focused in part on the seizure of the news media.

“His method is to poison the channels of public information,” Wallace wrote of the American fascist. “With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

The institutions that anchored American society even during our darkest times have now been eroded if not fully collapsed. The Supreme Court, the regulatory state, businesses any interest in long term stability have either been seized or gutted. Tech billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel are ideological madmen who want to bring about the end of democracy.

The fall of the media and information systems to billionaire fascistic collaborators would be beyond catastrophic, and it’s why we need to build up the courageous reporters, the people willing to speak truth to power, and the platforms that carry their voices. Now, before they can be discredited and silenced.

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The final sprint: It's not particularly useful to scream that Trump is a fascist — far more important, as Wallace wrote all the way back in 1944, is improving people's lives so that they aren't seduced by the promises of a strongman.

Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase.

This has been a central premise of this newsletter since it launched back in 2017 and what I’ve stressed repeatedly over the past few months of this campaign. As I wrote on Wednesday, progressives and labor unions are desperately trying to move the Harris campaign back toward economic populism, and there’s a chance that the message finally broke through today.

• One of the conclusions of a new poll commissioned by liberal Super PAC Priorities USA and “leaked” to reporters was that narrowing the campaign’s closing message to “known scumbag is a scumbag” just isn’t convincing to voters.

• Instead, the analysis suggests that Harris focus on the lives of voters and how they will be materially impacted by this election.

• During a press conference ahead of her rally in Texas tonight, a reporter asked Harris what she’d say to voters who think she doesn’t talk enough about the economy. She filibustered at first and then finally said she’d prioritize bringing down the cost of living, though it wasn’t particularly convincing. Hopefully it’s something of a wakeup call…

Unprecedented: As more and more early votes are cast, opinion polls generally became less and less useful, and with nearly 40 million ballots now banked, major outlets have begun rolling out their final surveys.

The race really could not be closer if both campaigns tried to maintain parity. The final New York Times poll has Harris and Trump tied at 48% apiece and the CNN poll puts them all knotted up at 47% each. YouGov’s poll for The Economist finds Harris up 49% to 46%, while the Wall Street Journal’s most recent poll puts Trump up by the same margin.

The cross-tabs and additional questions all carry point in the same directions, though the discrepancies between the candidates vary. CNN’s poll finds Trump with a 13% lead on who would better handle the economy, which only reinforces the discussion above about Harris desperately needing to switch up her focus.

The biggest concern is the ongoing negativity about the country’s direction — the NYT poll found 61% saying it’s going in the wrong direction and just 28% pleased with the course of things. Also troubling: a large majority of respondents say they were better off four years ago (I’m starting to suspect that a lot of Americans quietly loved getting to loaf at home and living on enhanced unemployment and stimulus checks during the pandemic).

Laboring for Kamala: Last Saturday, a coalition of major unions that endorsed Kamala Harris kicked off a final, frenetic two-week canvass across Nevada and the Midwestern swing states in hopes of convincing their members to vote for the vice president.

When we talk about union voters, we tend to focus on those that have predominantly private sector members, like the UAW, Teamsters, and Steelworkers. But in many redder states, there are actually more public sector union workers, and even in the relatively union-dense Pennsylvania, they make up half the state’s members.

AFSCME, the biggest public sector union, is investing heavily in GOTV in Pennsylvania, where they’re leaning heavily on the proposals in Project 2025 that would likely lead to their forced disbanding. That and the end of all health and safety regulations on the job. That’s a scary prospect, too.

As for the Teamsters, the national leadership’s decision not to endorse anybody has kept its electoral infrastructure on ice, but the enormous roster of state and locals that defiantly backed Harris are doing their best to make up for it. Sean O’Brien’s antagonism toward Democrats looms large, though I get the sense that he’s becoming increasingly less popular among rank and filers.

In Wisconsin, the ghost of Scott Walker and his attempts to kill off unions for good continue to animate opposition to Republicans among members who have the scars from those battles.

Voting Rights: A federal judge ruled that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s blatantly illegal attempt to purge eligible voters so soon before the election was indeed blatantly illegal. The 1600 people he managed to toss from the voter rolls will be returned, and there’s nothing that Governor Sweater Vest can do about it.

Respect: The next Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives shot down fellow Republicans who have publicly promised to find ways around the abortion rights amendment that voters are overwhelmingly like to approve in November.

“It will be the law of the land,” state Rep. John Patterson told voters at a candidates’ forum this week “And we have to go forward as the people decide.”

Other Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, who is likely to win a promotion next month, have suggested that lawmakers are committed to reinstating the state’s total abortion ban, which has no exceptions for rape or incest. The pro-choice amendment on the ballot would protect reproductive freedom up until the time of viability, which is usually around 24 weeks.

“There will be ideas from the legislature, I’m sure, and other groups, on how to continue to protect innocent life,” Kehoe said, later adding: “I will do everything I can to work with legislators and other folks around the state to find ways to make sure we continue to do that in some form or fashion.”

A recent poll found that 58% of Missourians planned on voting for the amendment and just 30% are set on voting against it, suggesting a significant amount of support from Republicans.

On that note: A county judge in Ohio ruled on Thursday that the state’s six-week abortion ban was rendered unconstitutional by the reproductive rights amendment approved by voters last year.

It’s a blow to GOP Attorney General Dave Yost, who tried to keep the ban largely intact despite enormous public opposition. It was worth a try, as Republicans in Ohio have a long history of successfully ignoring constitutional amendments that they don’t like.

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