Andrew Sage

I am your host, Mio Wong.

Long ago, 2013, in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist, purchased the Washington Post.

This was a sign of things to come.

The danger of the American free press is, and has always been, that we do not have a free press, we have a capitalist press.

Writing, and especially reporting, is a material product.

Journalists have to eat, they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people.

All of this requires capital.

And the problem with all of this requiring capital...

is that capital is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess capital have interests.

Fast forward to 2020, as protests and uprisings raged across the United States against the police and white supremacy.

A battle broke out inside of the New York Times' newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called Send in the Troops, calling for, you guessed it, sending in the troops to attack protesters, published by a member of the American government named Tom Cotton.

Editors resigned in outrage.

Debates raged across journalist slacks.

It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the United States fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom.

2020 was a significant danger to the ruling class.

The actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed was this.

If the premise of 2020 is true, which is that the U.S.

is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system, which, you know, has legal slavery in it from the structure of the 13th Amendment, and reproduces it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible.

And here there be dragons.

The ruling class needed to move to stop it.