Are Most Americans Even Paying Attention?

It has been another week of unfettered moral depravity in the United States. Donald Trump held a Klan rally lightly disguised as a cabinet meeting where he railed against Somali immigrants. Pete Hegseth defended the cruel and illegal boat strikes that have murdered at least 83 civilians. Marco Rubio put forward a “peace plan” for Ukraine that amounts to giving Vladimir Putin everything he’s ever wished for. And saddest of all? Most people probably don’t even know any of it happened.

One of the most disturbing stories I saw this disgusting week highlighted new research from Pew showing that news consumption is on the decline across all political parties and age groups. The report, which was focused on adults under 30, found that only 15 percent of people in that age group follow the news “all or most of the time.” When they do, it should surprise no one, they consider the “news” to be whatever they come across on social media.

I can hardly blame them. The news is depressing. Given Trump’s entrenched cult following, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything that can be immediately done to stop him. Mainstream outlets are more interested in appeasing power than in holding it to account. And the “opposition party” is feckless (more on that later). I got sick over Thanksgiving, and during the uninterrupted days I spent lying in bed and praying for death, did I watch “the news”? No, I did not. I watched movies about space (Apollo 13 is the best movie that inaccurately features no Black people ever made), and allowed myself to get enveloped in the Lane Kiffin coaching drama. I wasn’t physically or mentally healthy enough to be informed about America for a week.

This country is a horror show, and a lot of people don’t like watching scary movies. I can’t blame them for looking away. Unfortunately, the filth will not clean itself up.

Right now, Hakeem Jeffries is the worst argument for the proposition that Hakeem Jeffries should be speaker of the House. His performance this week has been awful, bordering on complicit.

First, the man gave Trump credit for “securing the border.” Then, he praised Trump for pardoning corrupt Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar, who had been indicted on charges of accepting $600,000 in bribes. He wrapped things up by telling the press that they should not expect the Democrats to pursue impeachment charges against Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth.

The country is crying out for leadership against the violent, racist, and corrupt Trump administration. The country is desperate for leaders who will fight Trump on every ground: political, economic, legal, and moral. And Jeffries spent a week doing press hits for the man. Literal silence would have been better than what Jeffries did this week.

The problem with Jeffries is that he wants to be the leader of the Democratic Party, and that is a very different job from being the leader of the opposition party. It’s the difference between waiting for your turn at the wheel versus trying to break the wheel. Jeffries is not a revolutionary or a reformer. He’s not an activist or crusader. He’s just a careerist. He’s carefully and competently positioned himself to be this close to getting a promotion, and he’s trying desperately not to screw that up.

Jeffries exposes the problem with the “leadership” of the entire Democratic Party: Their posture in the face of fascism is not one of insurgency or resistance but one of parliamentarian games and political stunts. They occasionally talk like they know Trump and MAGA are totalitarian threats to democratic self-government, but they don’t act like it. Instead, they act like Trump is a normal American president and can be defeated through normal political means. Democrats want people out in the streets shouting “no kings,” but Jeffries wouldn’t dare throw Trump’s tea in the water, and he’d support the prosecution of anybody who did.

The people, throughout history, who lead anti-authoritarian movements are people who are willing to be jailed for the cause. They’re people who are willing to be killed by the very regime they’re opposing. Hakeem Jeffries is not one of those people. He’s just the moderate guy at the politburo, trying to distinguish himself from the “hard-liners,” hoping he’ll get a chance when the old man kicks the bucket.

It might work. Jeffries might well get the promotion he’s angling for. I will spend most of next year arguing that Democrats must retake the House and, therefore, that Jeffries must be the next speaker of the House in order to put some restraint on the fascist president. But Democrats like Jeffries will never defeat Trump, because Democrats like Jeffries are not willing to challenge the system that produced him. They’re just waiting for their turn to be in charge of that system.

What I Wrote

Pete Hegseth is a murderer. I wrote about all the laws that make that so. He should be impeached, regardless of what Hakeem Jeffries thinks.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

So Lane Kiffin was the head football coach of the Ole Miss Rebels (a name I can’t believe they’re allowed to keep). He left the school last week to become the head coach of the LSU Tigers, a rival to Ole Miss, despite the fact that Ole Miss is slated to be in the College Football Playoffs while LSU is not. This has, understandably, angered Ole Miss fans, and many in the college football community are decrying Kiffin’s betrayal of the university, even though, in straight football terms, the LSU job is clearly the better one.

Kiffin got a seven-year, $91 million contract from LSU—a public university—which works out to about $13 million per year, making him the second-highest-paid coach in the country. With it, he immediately becomes the highest-paid public official in the state of Louisiana (although it is not at all uncommon for the football coach of the public university to be the highes-paid public employee in a state).

It’s interesting that this is happening in Louisiana, because the only reason the LSU job was open is because the school recently fired its last high-paid coach, Brian Kelly. The state of Louisiana still owes him $54 million.

After Kelly was fired, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry threw a fit. He vowed that the LSU athletic director would not be allowed to offer such an expensive contract again, and that future contracts would not be guaranteed so as not to put Louisiana taxpayers on the hook for a football coach they’ve already fired. Landry is a Republican—and while you know I don’t like saying nice things about Republicans, Landry was exactly right on this point. The salaries of college football coaches (and basketball coaches) are completely out of whack with the public universities they work for. It would be one thing if all of the billions of dollars college sports generates were going back into the states, but they’re not. LSU is not funding levees in New Orleans.

With the hiring of Kiffin, it would appear that Landry’s directive was completely ignored by LSU. Not only did it hire a coach for $91 million; it gave him a fully guaranteed contract, and that contract was negotiated by the very same agent who represented the former coach.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned that even the president was relatively powerless in the face of the military-industrial complex. I imagine Jeff Landry could now speak about the football-industrial complex. There appears to be no way for even the governor of a state to stop the madness when the football team needs a famous new head coach.

I’ve said multiple times: A presidential candidate who ran on getting corruption and graft out of college sports, allowing for fair competition while distributing the money generated by the sports more equitably, would win in a landslide. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for a presidential candidate who runs on getting corruption and graft out of the White House.

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Elie Mystal

Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v. U.S.” here.