US onAir Curators
Top Democratic Senator Slams Biden’s “Shameful” and “Weak” Inaction on Gaza
Sen. Chris Van Hollen also talks to Mehdi about Kamala Harris’s election defeat and the mistake of touting a Dick Cheney endorsement.
Team Zeteo
“President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful,” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland tells Mehdi on this week’s ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’. “I mean, there’s no other word for it.”
It’s not often that a top Democratic senator and long-term party loyalist unleashes on a sitting Democratic president, but Van Hollen – who has been critical of the US’s unconditional support for Israel since October 7th – doesn’t hold back in this wide-ranging and exclusive conversation with Mehdi and Zeteo.
The Media Needs a Reinvention Not Just a Wake-Up Call After Trump’s Surprise Win
Sharon Waxman, The Wrap
True. So what do the rest of us do? I’m not yet seeing the self-examination that is warranted. We need a collective brainstorm and a serious response as a profession. We have lost the room. Never in my life did I think that the scarcity of information that existed before the rise of mass media might be less risky for our democracy than an oversupply of information. Nor was I imaginative enough to think that a focused stream of misinformation would present a serious challenge to real reporting and news.
If people have moved away from network news and broadsheet newspapers to opinionated podcasts and TikTok lies, then that’s one signal of how things need to change. If more people are watching “television” on YouTube than on any given broadcast or cable network, then OK – the table stakes have changed.
Let the Autopsy Continue … Ten Reasons Trump Won — and Why We Must Soldier On
OLD GOATS with Jonathan Alter
1- Biden’s Selfishness, 2- Global Anti-Incumbent Headwinds, 3- The Migrant Crisis, 4- Covid Relief Checks, 5- Harris’s Race and Gender, 6- The Triumph of Fuck-You Politics, 7- Demagoguery, 8- 2019 Woke Bidding War, 9- Rightwing Disinformation, 10- Low-Propensity Voters
The Trump Sh*t Show Arrives in D.C.: Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, and Trump himself. Buckle up.
Morning Shots Bulwark, William Kristol and Andrew Egger
I knew Pete Hegseth fifteen years ago when he was a young, pro-Iraq war veteran, moving in Weekly Standard/Project for a New American Century circles. He seemed to be an effective proponent of neoconservative foreign policy, and some of us wanted to think well of him and give him a hand on a promising career. I even weighed in (ineffectually) on his behalf when he ran for the Republican nomination for senator in Minnesota—against, as I recall, a Ron Paul–supporting America First type.
But as sometimes happens, my judgment and that of others was mistaken. Hegseth turned out to be personally untrustworthy, intellectually shallow, and politically opportunistic. He moved on and was encouraged to move on out of our world, and ended up in the orbit of Fox News and Trumpist sycophancy, where he fit in well.
The New Class Politics
Last Tuesday’s realignment was decades in the making.
Michael Baharaeen, Persuasion
Looking at this picture, it’s hard not to see that the Democrats have now become the party of the very thing they have long fought against: the elites. This stands in sharp contrast to their longtime image as the party of the working class, which is further and further in the rearview mirror. According to political scientist Matt Grossmann, white college-educated voters this year became a plurality of the coalition for the first time ever, surpassing both non-college whites as well as voters of color.
Moreover, this new coalition risks putting the Democrats on electorally unsound footing. Although college graduates are more reliable voters than their non-college peers, they also constitute a much smaller share of the population. Without a meaningful share of working-class voters in the mix, the party will struggle to be competitive.
