The Cruelty is the Talking Point

Schultz, DeSantis, and stenographers

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

On Thursday night, I hit publish on Nazis For DeSantis, a satirical new website about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s blossoming relationship with neo-Nazis and the national political media’s failure to hold him to account.

It’s taken months of work to get the site written and up off the ground, and as if on cue, white nationalist groups emerged from their bunkers this weekend to inflict terror on minority communities across Florida.

All four incidents were unmistakably linked to DeSantis — there were antisemitic banners and projections in his hometown of Jacksonville as well as a planned attack on a drag show in Orlando — but hold your breath for him to disavow the latest outburst from goose-stepping goons. If he got away with refusing to say a word about the Nazis that marched with his campaign sign in Tampa this summer, there’s no real incentive for him to do so now.

The site is supposed to be a long-term project, aimed at reminding people of DeSantis’s extremist ties and prodding reporters into asking at least a few tough questions of a presidential aspirant who has experienced little pushback. Now, updating Nazis for DeSantis (it’s funny, I promise, go check it out and share it) could become almost a full-time job in and of itself.

In tonight’s edition of the newsletter, we’re going to discuss extremism, systemic failures of the media, and the under-appreciated stakes of the midterm elections.

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A federal judge in Western New York has ordered members of Starbucks Workers United to turn over emails, texts, and any other digital messages that they’ve exchanged with journalists about the organizing campaign. The union, an off-shoot of the SEIU, immediately appealed to the 2nd Circuit, where the case is pending.

Though it went under the radar when first issued last month, the ruling shatters all precedents and brazenly violates the First Amendment rights of journalists and union organizers. There is no compelling interest for the government to intervene like this — Starbucks is accusing the union of spreading misinformation, which is rich coming from a company that continues to publicly maintain that it has not engaged in union-busting, regardless of how many unionizing workers it’s fired and times the NLRB has found it guilty of, well, union-busting.

Unsurprisingly, the ruling was issued by a judge installed on the court by Donald Trump, whose prolific reshaping of the judiciary will continue to create unprecedented obstacles for workers, activists, and anyone seeking to assert their rights or create progressive change.

Starbucks Workers United has successfully organized 250 stores and thousands of employees over the past 15 months. It’s been a remarkable rise, beginning with a couple of workers at a handful of cafes in Buffalo to a national movement that serves as a symbol of a new labor uprising.

The ruling threatens to put so many of those workers in the crosshairs, and having extensively covered the nascent organizing efforts since being the first to take it seriously back in August 2021, the order could put my texts and emails under subpoena as well. I have complete confidence in my reporting on the union, and any errors were of my own doing and had nothing to do with being fooled by the union, but it’s unnerving nevertheless.

Whether the ruling stands is almost immaterial. It takes years for the right-wing’s most fringe ideas to be laundered into our laws and traditions, and now the clock has begun ticking on this deeply un-American and downright dangerous standard. It makes one wonder why Beltway journalists are so eager to coddle and legitimize the far-right lawmakers that so regularly target media and and confirm goon judges like Sinatra to the federal judiciary.

The Cruelty is the Talking Point

There was a moment during Tuesday night’s debate between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz that was both disgusting and revelatory of our broken political system. And it’s not the one you think it is.

Televised debates between candidates are by now largely dreadful events that offer little actual debate or useful information. Instead, they’re largey a series of little performances designed to impress journalists and pundits, who evaluate them based on how they suppose the hypothetical voter that they’ve constructed in their heads might react.

It’s a truly useless exercise, made worse when context and moral implications are absent from the analysis that follows.

If you’re a Democrat, your big takeaway from Tuesday’s debate was the boneheaded comment Oz made about abortion, which instantly went viral and then became the subject of a rapid response ad from Fetterman’s campaign. Yet much of the focus from the media was once again trained on whether Fetterman missed some words when speaking off the cuff and how the aforementioned hypothetical voter might react to his stumbles.

Had the political press read pre-debate polling, reporters and pundit would have known that a strong majority of voters didn’t actually care to learn more about Fetterman’s post-stroke communication skills, which are improving by the day but have not yet fully been recovered.

Actual Pennsylvania voters, the ones whose lives will be shaped by the outcome of these elections and will have to live for six years with one of these two men as their senator, instead wanted to know about Fetterman and Oz’s plans for the economy, crime, and abortion. Those are issues that impact them on a day to day basis; how quickly and clearly a senator can quip back on stage or in the Senate gallery have no bearing on their lives.

Sucks to be them, I guess. Maybe they can find a sentence or two on inflation if they watch the whole debate back.

What makes this particularly unfortunate is that the media’s own obsession with Fetterman’s temporary audio processing issues — I’ve written about this before — is that it has been driven in part by Oz’s relentless attacks on the campaign trail. He’s made it his number one line of attack against Fetterman since the summer, mocking him through statements by press aides, advertisements, and in his own bracing comments.

This isn’t an unexpected tactic for cynical, bottom-feeding Republicans, but in the rush of campaign horse race coverage, it seems that most reporters have forgotten that Dr. Oz is an actual doctor. As a result, when Oz swiped at Fetterman during the debate by saying, “Obviously I wasn’t clear enough for you to understand this,” it was noted by reporters as more sharp quip than public act of cruelty by someone who should know better.

I’m a lifelong heart patient at NewYork-Presbyterian, the same hospital — and unit — where Dr. Oz used to practice as a cardiac surgeon. I’ve had four major open-heart surgeries at that hospital, and it’s hard to explain just how vulnerable you feel as a patient in the days leading up to and after the operation.

You are fully exposed, literally and figuratively, putting your life ultimately in the hands of a few strangers. My last surgery had some serious complications, requiring the medical team to act fast and put me in a coma for a week. When I woke up, the pain from the chest tubes was so excruciating that I could barely function, so the mere thought of nurses or my surgeon mocking me during that time has me burning with embarrassment and sadness.

Dr. Oz has earlier this month that he wouldn’t talk like this about a patient, but now there’s really no reason to believe him. He is an utterly unqualified candidate for US Senate, a disgraced TV host who peddles false miracle cures and seances, and a cruel man who does not deserve to have dominion over anybody else’s life — especially if he’s going to mock them.

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