There’s no denying the Trump campaign is trying to court Black voters, and the appeal to protect “Black jobs” from immigrants seems designed to do precisely that. While support for Trump among Black voters remains low, some believe that ought to change. Janiyah Thomas, Black Media Engagement Director for the Trump campaign, joins Taya Graham of The Real News for a frank discussion about the election, the Supreme Court, the loss of affirmative action, reproductive rights, and the reality of being “Black MAGA.”
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Taya Grahama, Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Welcome to The Real News podcast. My name is Taya Graham, and today we’re diving headfirst into a topic that challenges our fundamental understanding of the Black community in America: The rise of Black conservative women who are literally changing the face of the Republican Party.
Now, we’ve heard a lot about Black men turning to conservatism, including a series of interviews I did at the Republican National Convention exploring why they support Trump — And just a quick fact, recent polls suggest as many as 20% of Black men are highly likely to vote for former President Trump. These are critical votes in an election that is already razor-thin.
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But what about Black women? What happens if they cross over in significant numbers? And that’s why we’re having a frank conversation with a bold Black woman who’s not only crossing party lines, but is taking an active leadership role in getting Donald Trump elected in 2024.
Black women have long been the bedrock of the Democratic Party, consistently delivering crucial votes and key victories. So what drives these women to align with a party that for many seems worlds apart from their communities? What are they gaining, and what are they risking in this controversial political realignment?
Well, joining us today is a dynamic force within the conservative movement: Janiyah Thomas, the Black Media engagement director for Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. And she previously worked on Senator Tim Scott’s campaign in South Carolina.
As she battles at the forefront of this volatile landscape, we’ll delve into her motivations, the obstacles she faces when defending the indefensible, and how she navigates the tension between her identity and her political stance. So get ready with me for an eye-opening discussion as we explore the challenges of taking on such a public role as a Trump surrogate and his envoy to the Black community.
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So without further ado, let’s dive into our conversation with Janiyah Thomas.
Janiyah Thomas: Yes, thank you for having me.
Taya Graham: Janiyah, I have to ask, how did you become the Black media engagement director for the entire Trump reelection campaign? What factors influenced your decision to take the role? And I have to say, especially in the light of what people view as President Trump’s controversial stances on issues affecting the Black community?
Janiyah Thomas: I mean, I think overall, I’ve been doing this for a while. I originally was the Black media coordinator at the RNC. That was my first job. So I’ve been working with Black press, and I love doing it because sometimes I feel like getting good stories, working with Black-owned media, I feel more rewarded because it’s not as easy to do that all the time, versus working with New York Times, like they’ll do anything and write about anything [laughs].
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So it feels more rewarding to work with Black-owned media. And also, as you know, a lot of as Black people rely on Black media to give them factual information, especially when we’re in an election year.
So that has everything to do with it. Part of the reason I took it is because it’s something I thought was really cool, and I feel really passionate about working with Black media.
And I love Donald Trump also, but I think it’s important to have somebody that’s able to speak to those issues, speak to that community, and also someone that’s able to develop relationships with that community as well.
Taya Graham: Well, I can see that you play a really important role in helping the Black community understand the Republican Party. But I would have to say, it has been strongly criticized for its stance on racial issues.
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For example, I have to ask you about affirmative action. The Supreme Court, back in 2023, rejected race-based affirmative action in college admissions. We just got information from MIT, there’s a drop in Black and Latino students, an increase in Asian students.
This is just the facts. This is just the new information that’s coming out since the removal of affirmative action. And this was a direct result of the conservative justices that President Trump appointed.
So what would you say to people who are saying that this means the Trump administration means less opportunity for Black Americans and not more?
Janiyah Thomas: I wouldn’t say that necessarily the takeaway from that shouldn’t be that it’s less opportunity for Black and Brown communities. I think that the overall point of the affirmative action decision is based on the simple fact of merit. I will speak personally to myself and say that I don’t want to be rewarded for something just because I’m Black or I’m a woman. I want to be there and be in that position because I’m the best person to be there.
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So the entire argument around affirmative action on the Republican side is we care more about your work ethic, your merit, and you should be rewarded based off of that.
Taya Graham: Well, you know what? I do agree with you about merit, but I’ll even use myself as an example. I went to a public school, and I actually got great SATs, great grades, but I didn’t have some of the extracurriculars that, let’s say, I might’ve had if I had gone to a more prestigious high school. And one could argue that affirmative action may have given me an opportunity to prove myself. Certainly I would — And I actually have witnessed this — Would’ve been put on academic probation, kicked out, lost scholarships if I didn’t perform.
But what would you say to people who are like, we’re just trying to get the foot in the door, we’re just asking for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, just opportunity?
Janiyah Thomas: I think overall that argument, what you just said, especially about your high school experience and things like that, a lot of that has to do with state level stuff when it comes to the education system. And I think that we need to focus more on those types of issues at the state and local level, especially when we’re talking about schools in inner city communities.
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And I think that something else we need to start doing better is implementing more mentorship programs so that these people in these underprivileged communities have more options and know that there’s another way out or there’s other things that you could be doing. There’s more to life than just what you’re seeing in the neighborhood.
Taya Graham: How would you reconcile President Trump’s behavior, which critics say often contradicts conservative values? Not to be crude, but if Vice President Harris had been married three times and had five children with three different men, I think people would not consider her a representative of conservative values. I think people would be very critical of those personal choices.
If you can respond to critics of the former president who say he does not embody conservative values or Christian values, what would you tell them?
Janiyah Thomas: I think a lot of these critics, a lot of it’s coming from media people, which, from my experience, their perception of reality and what actual voters care about are two different things. So I would say that I’ve never heard of an actual regular voter when we’ve been on the trail mentioning any of these things.
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The point is to say to the critics, we saw what four years of President Trump looked like, we saw what four years of Kamala Harris and the Biden administration looks like, and I think that for a lot of us, especially Black and Brown people, we were all doing better under President Trump’s leadership. And I think that it’s more about what he’s done as a candidate and what he’s done as the president of the United States, less and less about his personal life.
Taya Graham: Well, it’s interesting you said that because, as the Black media engagement director, you’re trying to reach out to the Black community and show people that the Republican Party perhaps isn’t what it’s painted by the media, that it is inclusive.
But I would say this: President Trump selected J.D. Vance as his vice president. I would say if he wanted to show the Republican Party was in a new era and welcoming Black and Brown Americans, Senator Tim Scott would’ve been an excellent choice. So I’m just curious what your take is on the choice of Vance over Scott, and do you think that affects the party’s image among Black voters?
Janiyah Thomas: Like I said earlier, we care about merit and who’s the best person for the job, and President Trump made that decision and chose J.D. Vance as our vice president candidate. Obviously, I’m from South Carolina. I think Tim Scott’s amazing. But I mean, it’s not always about what you look like to show people we’re the party of being inclusive. I think we can do that in multiple ways.
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President Trump is not the traditional Republican candidate. So I think a lot of the things that he’s done and is wanting to do haven’t always aligned with traditional Republican politics. So I think there’s ways to show that we’re inclusive and want more people to come join the party.
Example, having someone like Amber Rose speaking at our convention. That’s not something George Bush may have done [laughs], but just simple things like that, just showing and showing up. We’ve been going to Democrat-ran cities and meeting with voters there, and that’s not stuff traditional Republicans do either. So I think there’s more ways to show that he wants more people in the party and to be more inclusive versus who the vice presidential candidate is.
And I think overall our message with Black voters resonates the best with President Trump. I think that the reason we’re seeing an uptick of Black voters supporting President Trump is because they like his message. And again, like I said earlier, they’ve seen four years of Trump and they’ve seen four years of this administration, and I think that’s made it very simple for a lot of Black and Brown voters.
Taya Graham: There are people who feel that… I mean, Black women are considered the bedrock of the Democratic Party. And of course, there are Christian conservative women that still vote Democrat. So how do you respond to critics who say that you and other Black conservatives in leadership roles are there just for optics, or even worse, doing this for cynical reasons? How would you respond to that?
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Janiyah Thomas: I’ll say, at the end of the day, I don’t have to explain myself to anybody but the Lord and my parents [laughs]. So my motive for doing what I’m doing has nothing to do with cynical reasons or to be the token Black person.
Like I said earlier, the role of being able to have someone that can engage with Black press and has developed relations with Black press is very important in this election cycle. So I think that is the reason why I’m here.
I care about making momentum with Black voters, and I care about getting our message to that audience, whether that’s traditional, non-traditional, or Black-owned media. That’s my overall goal.
So I would say the critics and people are going to say what they want to say. They’re going to say stuff regardless if you’re on the right or the left. There’s always going to be somebody criticizing you. But I mean, we always get that typical, you’re an Uncle Tom. You’re a token, whatever.
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And at this point, I don’t care anymore. But it is more hurtful coming from other Black people because I think that the larger conversation we need to have as a community is we need to talk more about why we can’t have conversations, why we can’t agree to disagree, why it has to be a whole family fallout because one of us wants to think differently than the rest of the family.
I think the bigger conversation is what can we do better as a people to be able to have those tough conversations? Because if we want equality, then I think that means equality on the right and on the left.
Taya Graham: That’s a really interesting point that you want there to be space for diversity of opinion. And you pointed out, quite rightly, that the media sometimes is at fault in helping to, let’s say, inflame rhetoric or highlight questionable rhetoric. In particular, I would say there has been quite a bit of discussion around President Trump and Sen. Vance questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s Blackness. How would you even define personally what it is to be Black enough in America? Isn’t that really divisive rhetoric?
Janiyah Thomas: The funny thing is I hear more white people asking this question than Black people, especially when it comes to media. One, I’ll say that what he has said, especially during the NABJ conventions in that situation in particular, he didn’t say anything that Black Twitter hasn’t been saying for years, first of all. So I mean, if your algorithm aligns that way, then you’ve seen these tweets and you’ve seen these things.
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And the point of it is basically to say that she is a flip-flopper, and she goes back and forth on her identity and policy. So the point is to say, if you can’t stand firm in your identity, how can we trust what you say you’re going to do as the President of the United States?
Taya Graham: But the thing is though, she went to a historic Black university, she joined a Black sorority, it’s not like she has…
Janiyah Thomas: But since when are those qualifications for Blackness? I know white people that have done the same thing [both laugh]. I think we need to stop trying to categorize ourselves and put ourselves in this box to say, okay, well, you did XYZ, so that makes you Black enough. I don’t think that those two things are the qualifications, but I don’t think there is a qualification. I don’t think it matters what she is or what she isn’t. I think it’s more so about what she has done and what she can do.
Taya Graham: Let me ask you this. This conversation around being Black enough, don’t you think this rhetoric risks alienating voters? If Black Twitter is talking about it, if white people in the media are asking about this, this idea of being Black enough, it makes me go back to the one-drop rule and people being measured in sixteenths, in quarters, in eighths. To bring that up, I understand that you say you think it’s a symbol of flip-flopping, but this is the type of rhetoric that seems to divide, not unite.
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Janiyah Thomas: No, I understand what you’re saying, but I’ll say that I think that we need to focus more on removing her race and gender out of the conversation and focus more on the policies. I feel like the more we keep focusing on whether she’s Black enough, Black people have been having a conversation about who’s Black enough forever. And are we ever going to get to a conclusion? Probably not [both laugh].
So does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? We’re definitely not going to get to a conclusion before election day, so why are we still talking about it? I think we need to talk more about the things she’s done in the past and what she’s been doing as the vice president and what she claims she wants to do in the future.
Taya Graham: Janiyah, that’s actually a fair point to put aside race and gender. And so let’s put it aside for a moment and have you address some of the broader concerns that Trump’s policies are divisive or harmful to American democracy.
So for example, there are Republicans like Olivia Troye who said they felt more welcomed at the DNC, arguing that they were voting for democracy rather than for Democrats. So how do you counter this narrative? What would your response be to those Republicans like Ana Navarro or Stephanie Grisham, who was a former White House press secretary? What would you say to these lifelong Republicans who say that Trump is a threat to democracy?
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Janiyah Thomas: I think that we had a traditional convention with traditional votes from the delegates. Yes, they just shoved Kamala Harris down everyone’s throat, basically, with their process. So I’ll say that I think that I don’t care as much about what they’re doing and saying at their convention on the left or whatever, and these Republicans or former Republicans going to join and vote for democracy, as they say.
At our convention, we had Never Trumpers for Trump, including our vice presidential candidate. We don’t talk about it a lot, but he was, at one point, a Never Trumper, and now he is on our presidential ticket with him. I think we care more about uniting the party and they care less about that. So if they feel like going to the DNC is they’re upholding democracy, then that’s their business.
But I think that most people can see that what we’ve done on our side is… Nothing about what we’ve done, nobody’s lost rights with President Trump as the president. I don’t think that that argument of upholding democracy, we’ve never done anything to do the opposite. I think, if anything, we could say the opposite about the left.
Taya Graham: Well, I think people would assert, and actually I’ve had conversations about this because I was really excited to have the opportunity to speak with you and Tia, and they are genuinely concerned that former President Trump would not accept election results if they were not in favor. And they did point to Jan. 6 and the things he said that day and what occurred as an example of that, as well as some of his recent comments.
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That’s where this pushback is coming from, from people who really are concerned that he would not accept election results and perhaps stall and stall the process.
Janiyah Thomas: Again, as I said earlier, I think this is another thing that I only hear coming from the D.C. people or people in the media. I don’t think that the Jan. 6 situation is a top of mind issue for voters. I think what people care about is the economy. They care about immigration. They care about crime. Those are the biggest issues for people. I’ve never once heard a voter say Jan. 6 is a determining factor in the election for them.
Taya Graham: You brought up some good points in that these are not the things that voters are really interested in. They don’t really care who spoke at the RNC, or if the DNC had people who are former Republicans, or if the RNC didn’t have former Republican presidents come out and show their support.
So if you say these sorts of things don’t matter, then you’re saying that policy does. What are some of these policies that you say people are excited to hear that the Trump administration is offering? If you could give me some examples of the policies that you’ve told voters about and they’re excited by.
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Janiyah Thomas: I’ll start with my favorite, the opportunity zone funding that he did with Sen. Tim Scott. I think a lot of people don’t really understand the concept of opportunity zones. Basically what it did was it put private investment into distressed communities, and most of these communities were communities of color, and it generated billions of dollars in these communities.
And secondly, I would say his tax cuts during his administration also boosted the economy. So I think that voters…
Taya Graham: Well, I’m sorry to interrupt you there, but there definitely is, I would say, solid research that suggests that the tax cuts benefited wealthy folks more than it did, let’s say, middle-class and lower-income folks. That this is a continuation of the Reagan cuts on some of our wealthiest members of our country, going from what was a 70% income tax rate, right now we’re down to what? I think the Harris administration is trying to push it back up to 23%?
There were huge tax cuts that one could argue stimulated the economy, but truly benefited some of the wealthiest people in our country. These weren’t tax cuts that lower-income and middle-class people received.
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Janiyah Thomas: I think that what President Trump has done did benefit middle-class people. I think that stimulating the economy and creating more jobs benefits middle-class and lower-class Americans. I think especially when we’re talking about the unemployment rate around Black people, he had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the most recent 10 years or so. And I think that I hear a lot of people talk about that, especially in Chicago. I’ve heard people mention how they are not getting jobs because illegal immigrants are getting handed jobs in these neighborhoods.
So I think that during Trump’s administration, I think a lot of people were better off financially overall, whether you’re upper-middle-class, middle-class, wealthy people. I think everybody was better off because of his economy. And I think that his economy stimulated in a horizontal way versus a vertical way.
And I’ll say that a lot of Black voters care about, especially when we’re talking about the jobs thing. In Chicago alone that’s been a huge issue that they did not want to talk too much about at the DNC. But a lot of resources have been going to these illegal immigrants, and they’re looking over the people that have been in these neighborhoods for decades.
Taya Graham: I have to admit that is something that I’ve heard as a concern from people in my community, in the Black community, that they’re concerned that immigrants, in particular Latinos, are being offered work that they would prefer to be offered. And that’s just simply on an anecdotal level.
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But what you’re referring to sounds to me like trickle-down economics. That sounds to me like Reaganomics where you give tax cuts up here and that’s going to stimulate the economy and the money’s going to come down. And this is actually, I don’t know if you watch the DNC if you put yourself through that, but former President Bill Clinton got on stage and said during the period where Democrats are in charge, 50 million jobs were created from his presidency onward, and only one million of those came from the Republican Party.
And even if you control for the impact of the pandemic, that’s still a big lead on jobs being created. How do you respond to former president Clinton saying something like that?
Janiyah Thomas: I would say they’ve had the White House for 16 out of the last 20 years, I think. I’m not have an accurate number on that, but they’ve had the power for most of this amount of time. And I’ll say that, yes, I understand that they’re trying to say the same thing now about these new job numbers that they’re implementing, that they claim that they don’t know where some of the numbers came from or whatever.
I’ll say that I think that the job numbers, and especially when we’re talking in Black and Brown communities, a lot of these jobs have been documented, especially this most recent jobs report, have been documented that are going to illegal people, and they’re not going to people in these communities.
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So yeah, maybe there are more jobs, maybe there aren’t. But the point is that the people in these communities that have been there for decades aren’t getting these resources, is what I’m saying.
Taya Graham: Well, Janiyah, because I want to move to another topic, I am not going to bring up what are these Black jobs. If this is a Black jobs thing, I’m not even going to go there.
But I’m going to actually move on to women’s rights, in particular, the right to choose, pro-life, pro-choice, depending on how you view it. And so let me follow up with you on this.
At the DNC, there were women who came forward, one woman who nearly lost her life to an ectopic pregnancy because she couldn’t get termination services by doctors because they were afraid of prosecution. There was a very moving story of a young woman who was on stage, she’d been sexually assaulted by her stepfather, and she had to have an abortion at age 12.
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So I have to ask you, hearing these women’s stories, how does the Trump administration want to move forward on this issue? Because as we’ve seen as some of these hard-line rules that have come into effect to prevent any form of abortion from six weeks onward or at all, no exceptions, rape or incest, how does the Trump administration want to move forward on this issue?
Sen. Vance has come out very firmly against any exceptions for rape or incest. Is there any chance that President Trump will go against some of his fellow Republicans and put his trust in women to make these decisions and choose to take government interference out of the picture? Will he choose to push aside his fellow Republicans and put his trust back in women?
Janiyah Thomas: I’ll make this answer very short and simple because I don’t want to get into the personal stuff, but I will say that President Trump has come out and said that he’s not promoting a national abortion ban. Whether the media wants to cover it or not, he’s not doing that. And basically the point was, even with the Supreme Court case, is to leave it to the states.
So what he stands for is leaving the abortion rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, or whatever we want to call it, is up to the states to decide.
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Taya Graham: There’s a good portion of Americans, and I would say this from polls as well as social media, as well as even our own comment section on YouTube, there’s a good portion of Americans that find former President Trump and Sen. Vance’s remarks insulting, even divisive.
There were Vance’s remarks on people without children not contributing to society, that they don’t have any true stake in its future. And of course, the infamous childless cat ladies remark. There are some really derogatory remarks that President Trump made about women, women who are admired journalists, whether it was April Ryan or, recently, Rachel Scott of ABC, he referred to them both as nasty. He even called Maxine Waters, Sen. Waters low IQ. So these things people do remember.
So how do you address concerns of voters who feel alienated and even alarmed by this rhetoric, who say, this feels to me that President Trump, Sen. Vance, they don’t respect women? How would you respond to people who remember those remarks and it hurt them?
Janiyah Thomas: I’ll say, I think it’s important for people to do their research past a 30-second clip. I think that a lot of times, especially in these situations with candidates or just even any type of public figure, we always see on social media, or even on the news, it’s like a 30-second clip. You don’t get the whole gist of the argument.
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I’m not talking about anything, one particular comment in general, but I’m saying that the left sits there and they name call, they attack President Trump all day. But if he says anything remotely negative about somebody, then it’s a whole ordeal. And it’s not fair to always have a double standard with the right and the left.
And I’ll say also that I think that…
Taya Graham: Well, it’s a little different when the president of the United States calls you out as opposed to the power that a reporter might have. If the president of the United States calls you out and says that you’re nasty or that you’re low IQ, the whole world hears that. It’s not the same as somebody on social media calling him an authoritarian. I mean, that’s the power of the office.
Janiyah Thomas: But this current administration has also attacked him personally, and they call him a racist, and that’s the narrative they like to spin around him all day. So there’s not that much of a difference between the two things, to me, if you’re attacking somebody’s character in that way.
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Taya Graham: Well, the difference, and now, this is not to go on the defense for the Biden-Harris administration by any means, but the differences are those are two sets of equals; people who both held the office of the presidency, who have wielded political power, who have money in their bank accounts. That’s different than a president calling women nasty. There are other remarks, I won’t go into detail out of respect for your time and being here, but there have been some very derogatory remarks made towards women.
Janiyah Thomas: Well, I’ll say that, I mean, I think that we all need to, like I said, do our research and look into somebody’s past before you make an assumption about who they are as a person. I’ll say President Trump has done a lot to empower women. He’s empowered female architects in designing his buildings in the past. I mean, we have a female chief of… I mean, not chief of staff, sorry, a female campaign manager. He’s also had Kellyanne Conway as a campaign manager. He had Sarah Sanders, one of the first women and mothers to be press secretary. He’s had a bunch of powerful women around him.
And I think that also, even if we’re talking about Kellyanne Conway, she’s one of the first women to win a presidential election. So I think that he’s done a lot to empower women.
And I think that the narrative that they try to spin around him isn’t always fair. And I think that if people did more of their research and looked into his past, you would see he has done a lot to empower women. And I’m here, obviously so [laughs].
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Taya Graham: Well, I think the strongest case that he currently has is the fact that you’re here and you’re kind enough to spend your time with us, and we really do appreciate that.
I’ll just ask you one last question out of respect for your time, and hopefully this will give you some room to share why you support Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party so much. So I’m going to quote Civil Rights legend John Lewis here. He said, “We may have arrived on different boats, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
So in a time where many people believe that Trump’s rhetoric seems to divide rather than unite, how do you interpret and respond to this sentiment within your work? How do you want to communicate to Americans that Trump’s boat is big enough for all of us?
Janiyah Thomas: I have two part answers to this. The first thing is to go based off of the quote you just stated. I think that, especially with the younger generation, our concept of collective consciousness may not be as true anymore because we have a lot of Black people that grow up in rural environments, we have Black people that grow up in the suburbs, and we have Black people in the inner city communities.
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And I can say for my family, I grew up completely different than some of my cousins that are still in Virginia. So my outlook on life is completely different than theirs. So the way I vote and the way I feel politically might not always be the same as those people. And I think that it’s important for all of us to look at the issues that matter to you and vote your issues.
I’m 100% down with supporting President Trump because I care so much about the economy, and he is also one candidate that implemented the First Step Act, and that’s a huge criminal justice reform that has taken us a step in the right direction. So I can say that I think that Black people have a true champion and a leader in President Trump. And I think that our boat is for everybody.
We want all people here. We’re welcoming to all people. Like I said earlier, President Trump is not the traditional Republican candidate, and I think that his message and his straightforwardness resonates with a lot of people. And I think that, at least with President Trump, what you hear is what you get. He will stand on his word, and he doesn’t make promises he’s not going to keep. So I’m with President Trump because of that.
Taya Graham: Well, thank you so much. And even in just hearing that answer, I have a million more questions I would want to ask you, but I’m trying to be good in trying to respect your time. So Janiyah, I just want to thank you again. Thank you so much for joining me. I do appreciate it.
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Janiyah Thomas: Yes, thank you.
Taya Graham: I want to thank everyone listening for staying with me as I try to unravel the complexities and contradictions of Black women aligning themselves with the GOP in today’s polarized climate. Today’s discussion certainly has given me a lot to think about, and I’m so grateful that our guest was willing to let me really delve deep into her belief systems and even test those foundations. We’ve explored the complex intersection of race, gender, and politics through the eyes of an undeniably powerful Black woman who is deeply embedded in the conservative movement.
Janiyah Thomas, as the Black media engagement director for Trump’s reelection campaign, is focused on amplifying policies she believes will make inroads with the Black community. And although I think there are many valid criticisms of the statements and policies she defends, I respect her for being willing to put her money where her mouth is, even though she is betting it all on red.
Thank you for joining me on The Real News Network, and I hope this is just the beginning of what will be a series of provocative conversations. And this includes a conversation on book banning and LGBTQ rights with Tia Bess, the national engagement director of Moms for Liberty, a Black woman who’s not only married to another woman, but who is also profoundly Christian. We should have a link in the description if you’d like to take a listen or watch the video version of our conversation.
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I’m your host, Taya Graham. Thank you so much for listening and spending your time with me and The Real News Network.
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No publication has bettered the FT for the coverage of Boeing’s downward and tragic flight path resulting from putting financial engineering (sic) before real engineering. Rereading John Gapper’s piece about the revival of Rolls-Royce’s fortunes (Opinion, September 13) I was surprised to see no words of caution about the possible consequences of too much “squeezing” of a product that must work perfectly throughout its life, and no warning on the potential for a Boeing outcome.
For me, I am always reassured when I look out from a window seat to see the classic black and silver RR logo on the engine housing. Long may this continue.
Katie Martin A great moment in history has arrived. Rob Armstrong was right about something. Quite against the run of play — shush, Rob — quite against the run of play, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates — hurrah — from the highest level in decades, and for the first time since the pandemic. And what’s more, it went large, cutting by half-a-point, precisely as my esteemed colleague had predicted.
What kind of voodoo is this? Does the Fed know something horrible we don’t? Cutting by half-a-point is normally a crisis measure, a cry for help. Should we panic about a recession? And really, Rob was right. End times.
Today on the show, we’re going to explain how come investors are ignoring the usual script and taking this bumper cut as a good thing. This is Unhedged, the markets and finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I’m Katie Martin, a markets columnist here at FT Towers in London. And listeners, I must tell you, the saddest of things has happened. I’m joined by Rob Armstrong, lord of the Unhedged newsletter. But the sad thing is he’s dialling in from his sickbed. Rob, I’m sorry, you’re poorly.
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Robert Armstrong I am poorly. It’s terrible. But on a 50-basis-point day, the dead shall rise from their graves. The angels shall sing. And we all . . . we’re all gonna talk about it.
Katie Martin Yes. Good, strong Barry White vibes I’m getting from this voice you’re busting out today. So, as you say, half a percentage point from the Fed; that’s 50 basis points in market money. Normally central banks love being super boring and they normally move by quarter-point increments. So, I mean, was it the shock of being right about the 50-basis-point thing that pushed you over the edge into sickness?
Robert Armstrong It could have been. I’m so accustomed to getting this wrong now that it was really paralysing. However, I think, you know, you mentioned earlier, why is the market kind of taking this in stride and seeing this as a good thing? And I think it’s a bit of a communications success by the Fed in that they told the story about this, that they’re not doing this because they have to, because it’s an emergency. They’re doing it because they can.
Katie Martin So gangster.
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Robert Armstrong And the reason they can is because they’ve kind of beaten inflation. Right?
Katie Martin So for people who, unlike us, have a life and don’t sit around watching central bank press conferences, the way this works is they do the decision, they say, here you are, here’s your 25 or 50 whatever basis points, or we’re on hold. This time around, it was 50 basis points.
And then just a little while later, there’s a press conference where the chairman, Jay Powell, gets up in front of like all of the kind of most pointy headed Fed journalists in the world and fields whatever questions. There’s a statement, and then he field whatever questions they want to throw at him. And this for him was the point of highest danger, because the risk of giving the impression somehow that . . .
Robert Armstrong Yes.
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Katie Martin Yeah, we’re really worried. That’s why we’ve done 50. That was a serious risk, right? But instead, what happened?
Robert Armstrong Well, right from the press release announcing the 50 basis cut, they tweaked the language in the press release so that it was more affirmative and strong on the topic of inflation. We’re really pleased how it’s going on inflation.
Katie Martin Right, right.
Robert Armstrong And then in the press release, I mean in the press conference, he just reinforced that point again and again. The line he repeated was the labour market is fine, it’s healthy. It is at a good level. We don’t need it to get any better. We’re not trying to improve it, but we have the freedom to make sure it stays as good as it is.
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And that message seems to have gone through. Markets didn’t move yesterday afternoon. And as a very, you know, opening minutes of trading this morning, stocks are up. So that message seems to have gotten through.
Katie Martin Yeah. That is skills, actually. You know, I will hand it to them. Because, you know, it’s . . . we’ve said this before on this podcast. Like, it’s so easy to like throw stones and peanuts at the Fed or the European Central Bank, the Bank of England or whatever and say they messed this up. But, like, this stuff is hard. Getting the markets to come away with that sort of impression is not to be taken for granted.
Robert Armstrong It’s not to be taken for granted. I agree. However, I will note any time you’re trying to spin a narrative and you want people to believe it, one thing that really helps is if the narrative is true. And in this case, I think it broadly is.
I think inflation really does look like it’s whipped. It’s really either at or very close to 2 per cent. And look, with an unemployment rate of 4.2 per cent and basically no increase in lay-offs and the economy is still adding jobs, I think the economy is pretty good. So it’s not like he had to spin a magical tale of unicorns and wizards here. He just had to, you know, make a case based on the facts.
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Katie Martin Yeah. And and that kind of goes back to the fact that the Fed is not quite like all the central banks in that it has to look after inflation, but it also has to look after the jobs market. And so, you know, again, the risk is that you come away from a decision like this and think, well, you know, those little cracks that we’ve seen in the jobs market, maybe they’re the start of something really big and hairy and awful, but he seems to have massaged this one away.
Robert Armstrong Indeed. Impressive performance.
Katie Martin And so the other thing they do in this press conference is they give the general public and sad nerds like us a little bit of a taster about what’s coming next from the Fed, right. So they’re always, like, central bankers are at pains to say none of this stuff is a promise. This is just our kind of best current understanding of the state of the universe. But so, then you end up with this thing called — drumroll — the dot.
Robert Armstrong The dot plot.
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Katie Martin The dot plot. Explain for normal people what the dot plot is.
Robert Armstrong OK. So it’s kind of a grid. And along the bottom are the years 2024 through 2027, and then another column for the infinite future. And then there’s a range of interest rates going up and down on the side. And every member of the monetary policy committee puts a little dot in each year column where they think the rate is gonna be in that year. Cue much speculation about what all this means, how they’ve changed their mind since the last dot plot and, you know, the implications of all of this.
Katie Martin Whose dot is whose? We’ll never know.
Robert Armstrong They don’t reveal whose dot is whose. That’s an important point. And by the way, Katie, according to everything we hear out of the Fed, having invented this device, which was supposed to increase clarity and make everyone’s life easier, everyone in the Fed now hates it and wishes it would go away . . .
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Katie Martin Damn you, dot plot!
Robert Armstrong Because it just causes endless, idiotic little niggling questions from people like me and you. But once you’ve invented something like this, if you take it away, people get upset.
Katie Martin So you look at the dots and you look at what Jay Powell was saying at the press conference and what does it all add up to? Does it mean that, like, OK, they’ve started with 50 basis points, so like 50 is the new 25? Get used to it, boys and girls?
Robert Armstrong If you look at the dot plot and their kind of aggregate expectations of where rates are gonna go, it is not that 50 is the new 25. The implication is that the rate of cuts is going to be very measured — or might I say stately, from here until they reach their target.
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Katie Martin Right, right.
Robert Armstrong And, you know, another point to mention here is where they think they need to go is very important. That’s the kind of last part of the dot plot is, like, where should interest rates be when everything is normal again?
Katie Martin Because that will happen one day. And . . .
Robert Armstrong Yeah, that will happen. They think it’s gonna happen sometime around 2026, 27. We’ll get to where it’s about normal and they’re looking for about 3 per cent rates in the long run and that . . . so that’s where we’re going to. Just to set the context, we cut from 5.5 per cent to 5 per cent yesterday. And the map of the dot plot shows us moving towards a little under 3 per cent over time. And it’s a matter of how quickly are we going to get there, and along the way, are we going to change our mind and decide we have to go somewhere else?
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Katie Martin Yeah. So is there a kind of joyful hope that maybe the Fed could be, like, boring again and it can just sort of do 25 basis points here and there and just take this kind of glide path lowering rates that doesn’t get people excited any more?
Robert Armstrong Well, this is the problem about the future is that it is hard to predict and particularly hard to predict with interest rates. The issue is that the economy, the structure of the economy has changed a lot in the last couple of years because of the pandemic and for other reasons. So that final destination point I talked about, which economists call the neutral rate, which is the just normal, everything is boring and steady rate of interest in the economy where everyone has a job, there’s no inflation, everything’s cool, the neutral rate. We don’t know what that number is.
And Jay Powell has this line about it. We know it by its works. And what that means, stated less calmly, is we know it when we screw it up. In other words, we hit it, we go past it. We push interest rates above the neutral rate and stocks have a big puke and the economy starts to slow down and people get fired or we travel too far below it and inflation starts again. So like the Fed over the next couple of years is like walking down this passage in the complete dark and it knows it can’t touch the wall on its left or the wall on its right. Right? But it doesn’t know the shape of the passageway, what direction it’s supposed to go. So it’s just like, well, I sure hope we’re going this way. Dee-dee-dee. And hope it doesn’t hit too low or too high along the way.
Katie Martin Hope it doesn’t just walk into a wall.
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Robert Armstrong The history of interest rates is history of feeling your way along in the dark.
Katie Martin Rob, that’s the most lyrical thing I’ve ever heard you say.
Robert Armstrong Isn’t it? It’s poetry. It’s because I’m so ill. These could be the final words of a dying man.
Katie Martin What meds are you on for this cold you’ve got?
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Robert Armstrong This could be my legacy, Katie. (Laughter)
Katie Martin I feel like we should kind of wrap up quite soon before you just like expire during the recording.
Robert Armstrong I do. As much as I like you, I’d like to have a few words with my wife before I shove off.
Katie Martin But I will ask you, are we ever going back to like zero interest rates, do you think? Or are we gonna look back on that…
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Robert Armstrong I feel like I’ve been asking a lot of questions. This is a great question, Katie, but let me push it back on you. We had this wild period in the last decade where there was like a gajillion dollars of sovereign bonds issued at a negative interest rate.
Katie Martin I think that was something like $18tn or something.
Robert Armstrong Money was free. It was bonkers. And it was like the Fed funds rate was up against zero. Money was free. We were all in Silicon Valley inventing start-ups whatever, doing our thing. Do you think we’re going back to that? Like once this incident, the pandemic and everything after is over, are we going back?
Katie Martin I mean, I can’t see it. I buy the narratives that are kicking around about inflation now being structurally higher, right? There’s a climate emergency. There’s a global defence emergency. There is all sorts of things that governments need to spend lots of money on, borrow lots of money for, all things being equal. And then there’s the whole supply chain thing after COVID and with geopolitics yada-yada.
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Robert Armstrong And the world is getting older, right? And so when old people create demand for savings, that drives interest rates up, right?
Katie Martin Ah, old people. Yeah.
Robert Armstrong Old people.
Katie Martin But I think also before we wrap up, we should note that although you were right, about 50 basis points, I was right about the timing. I said on this here very podcast back in, I think it was June 2023, the . . . Not 24. 23. That the Fed is not gonna cut rates till the third quarter this year. So what I’m saying is I’m the genius here. You’re just like a (overlapping speech) took a coin flip.
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Robert Armstrong You’re basically Cassandra. Doomed to see the future and not be believed.
Katie Martin I’m going to . . .
Robert Armstrong Do I have the right mythological figure there? I think that was Cassandra.
Katie Martin Absolutely no idea. But I’m going to set up a hedge fund called like hunch capital where I can invest your money for two and 20. (Laughter) Based on nothing but pure hunches. Do you want in? Because like my hunch on that, your hunch on the other. I think we’re going to make good money.
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Robert Armstrong We could. We could be rich people, Katie. But I will answer your question seriously. I think interest rates are higher now. We’re not going back to zero. I will end on that serious point.
Katie Martin Yeah, yeah.
Robert Armstrong Governments are spending too much. They have to spend too much. There’s loads of old people. There’s the green stuff has to be funded. Productivity might be rising possibly because of AI. We are going into a higher interest rate world. And by the way, the Fed thinks that. If you look at the history of the Fed’s view of what the long term normal interest rate is, that has been steadily ticking higher over the last year and a half or so.
Katie Martin So rates have come down already pretty hard, but don’t get yourself carried away with thinking that we’re going back to zero, because ain’t . . . I mean.
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Robert Armstrong No. Ain’t gonna happen. Nope.
Katie Martin Ain’t gonna happen.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On that bombshell, we’re going to be back in a sec with Long/Short.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, now it’s time for Long/Short, that part of the show where we go long a thing we love, short a thing we hate. Rob, I feel like you should go first before you completely lose your voice. (Laughter)
Robert Armstrong Well, I’m going to go short wellbeing. And I say this not because my wellbeing is poor right now, but because of an article our colleague Joshua Franklin, wrote in the Financial Times yesterday that says, I’m quoting here, JPMorgan Chase has tasked one of its bankers with overseeing the company’s junior banker program, a response to renewed concerns about working conditions for young employees. And it goes on that this poor person is gonna have to make sure all these young investment bankers are happy and have work-life balance. I think investment bankers owe it to the rest of us to be miserable.
Katie Martin Right.
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Robert Armstrong They make a lot of money. They are the lords of the universe. They should not be happy. Their wellbeing should be awful. And that’s what you’re getting paid for. So I think JPMorgan Chase is doing the wrong thing here. And they need to appoint a banker to oversee the what’s the opposite of wellbeing. Unwell being of their junior bankers.
Katie Martin You’re a very, very mean person and you just want everyone to be sad like you.
Robert Armstrong No, if you want to be happy, become a journalist and make no money. If you want to be rich, become a banker and like get divorced and have your kids hate you. It’s just the normal way of life. (Laughter)
Katie Martin Well, I am long European banking merger drama. So if you’ve missed it, the German government is, like, quite scratchy and unhappy about a potential takeover of Commerzbank by Italy’s UniCredit. It’s the talk of the town. Everyone is kind of, you know, huddled around in bars in the city asking like, how the hell did UniCredit manage to amass like a nine per cent stake in this thing? Like that doesn’t seem like a good strategic move. There’s a lot of excitement over the motives. My interest here is that this is just like the good old days of European banking mergers with like very important European bankers wearing gilets under their jackets going around in like big fast cars and, you know, chatting away on their mobile phones and being masters of the universe.
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Robert Armstrong I just wish they would get along with it. As far as I know, in continental Europe, there’s actually more banks than people.
Katie Martin Yeah, it’s like sheep in New Zealand. You’ve just got . . . (Laughter)
Robert Armstrong They just need. I mean, as long as I’ve been in finance, people have been rattling on about how banking in Europe was going to consolidate. The industry was finally going to make some. They just need . . . I mean, as long as I’ve been in finance, people have been rattling on about how banking in Europe was going to consolidate. The industry was finally going to make some money and it was going be able to compete with the US. And then it’s like, you know, some Germans get mad at some Italians, it never happens and the cycle turns again.
Katie Martin Yeah, it’s like we want consolidation, but no, no, no, no, no. Not like that.
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Robert Armstrong Not like that.
Katie Martin Anything but that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And I am here for the drama is all I’m saying.
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Robert Armstrong Right on. I love it.
Katie Martin OK, listeners, we are going to be back in your feed on Tuesday if Rob makes it that long, but listen up anyway, wherever you get your podcasts.
Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. We had additional help from Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Special thanks to Laura Clarke, Alastair Mackie, Gretta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free. A 30-day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to FT.com/unhedgedoffer. I’m Katie Martin. Thanks for listening.
Republicans in North Carolina and nationally are assessing the potential fallout for former President Donald Trump from a bombshell report alleging that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the party’s gubernatorial nominee, posted disturbing and inflammatory statements on a forum of a pornographic website.
CNN reported Thursday that Robinson, behind an anonymous username he allegedly used elsewhere, made the comments more than a decade ago, including supporting slavery, calling himself a “black NAZI” and recalling memories of him “peeping” on women in the shower as a 14-year-old.
ABC News has not independently verified the comments were made by Robinson, and he insisted in a video posted to X prior to the story’s publication that “those are not the words of Mark Robinson.”
But Robinson, a Donald Trump ally, already has a history of incendiary remarks about Jews, gay people and others, and elections in North Carolina, one of the nation’s marquee swing states, rest on a knife’s edge, raising questions of how much the latest news will impact his race and other Republicans on the ballot with him — including the former president.
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“I think this only heightens the level of toxicity that the Robinson campaign has, and the real question becomes, what’s the radioactive fallout at the top of the ticket along with down the ballot for Republicans here in North Carolina?” asked Michael Bitzer, the Politics Department chair at Catawba College.
“This cannot be something that the voters aren’t going to recognize and probably play more into softening the Republican support. Is it isolated only to Robinson’s campaign, or does it start to impact Trump? Does it impact other statewide executive Republicans as well? We’ll just have to wait and see, but this feels like a pretty significant event in North Carolina politics.”
Robinson, who casts himself as a conservative family man and is running for North Carolina’s open governorship against Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, is already behind in the polls.
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PHOTO: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, R-NC., speaking on the first day of the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
While he holds statewide office and has broad name recognition, Robinson boasts a highly controversial record, including calling the Holocaust “hogwash” and homosexuality “filth,” and he drew claims of hypocrisy when he admitted this year that he had paid for his wife to get an abortion, seemingly in contrast with his stated opposition to the procedure, which he’d previously likened to “murder” and “genocide.”
North Carolina’s gubernatorial race is still considered competitive given the state’s tight partisan divide, but Republicans in the state told ABC News they had already viewed him as trailing, and that Thursday’s report won’t help.
“He’s already got a lengthy history of publishing comments like that on the internet. These are perhaps a little more graphic. In terms of does this by itself serve as a guillotine, I don’t know. But it feels like the cumulative weight is starting to add up now,” said one North Carolina GOP strategist. “It flies in the face of everything he presents of himself publicly. So, cumulatively plus the hypocrisy of this, it’s obviously hurtful to him.”
Republicans were more divided on what it means beyond Robinson’s own candidacy.
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North Carolina is a must-win state for Trump, and losing it would impose significant pressure on him to perform in other swing states.
Trump is already running ahead of Robinson — while polls show Robinson trailing, they also show a neck-and-neck race in the state between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris. The main question now is whether the news depresses Republican turnout in a state where even a small nudge in turnout one way or the other can make decide the victor.
“[Robinson] was already toast. The question is if it hurts Trump, something the campaign is very worried about,” said Doug Heye, a veteran GOP strategist with experience working in North Carolina. “It doesn’t directly cost him voters, but his endorsed pick continues to be a big distraction and has no money to drive out the vote.”
“He’s a baby blue anchor around Trump’s chances in the Tar Heel State,” added Trump donor Dan Eberhart. “This is not good news for Trump’s campaign at all.”
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PHOTO: North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson speaks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton on June 21, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, FILE)
Democrats are already seizing on the news to try to connect Robinson to Trump, who has repeatedly praised him, even calling him at one point “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Kamala HQ, an X page that serves as one of the Harris campaign’s rapid response tools, posted a slate of videos featuring Trump speaking positively about Robinson.
“His campaign was toast before this story, so the real impact is on all of the Republicans who have endorsed and campaigned alongside him,” said Bruce Thompson, a North Carolina Democratic fundraiser.
However, Trump has been able to navigate his own headwinds, including felony convictions in New York, questioning Harris’ race and more to remain the leader of his party and a viable presidential candidate, leading some Republicans to doubt that Robinson’s struggles will impact the presidential campaign.
“Doubt it impacts at all down-ballot,” said Dave Carney, a GOP strategist who chairs a pro-Trump super PAC.
“I don’t think it helps, but it won’t hurt,” added Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary.
PHOTO: Mark Robinson, Lt. Governor of N.C. and candidate for Governor, delivers remarks prior to Republican presidential nominee former President Trump speaking at a campaign event at Harrah’s Cherokee Center on Aug. 14, 2024 in Asheville, N.C. (Grant Baldwin/Getty Images)
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt sounded a confident note, saying in a statement that the former president’s team would “not take our eye off the ball.”
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“President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is a vital part of that plan. We are confident that as voters compare the Trump record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border, and safe streets, with the failures of Biden-Harris, then President Trump will win the Tarheel State once again,” she said.”
Still, sources familiar with the matter said the Trump campaign was bracing for a story to come out about Robinson and is planning on putting more distance between the former president and the embattled nominee Robinson — but initially did not have plans to call on him to drop out.
“He seems to not be impacted by what’s going on down-ballot underneath him,” the North Carolina Republican strategist said of Trump. “There’s no way it helps him. But does it hurt him? I don’t know, I think that’s an open question.”
According to a 2022 report by Article 19, an international organization that documents and champions freedom of expression, 80 percent of the world’s population lives with less freedom of expression today than did ten years ago. The eradication of basic freedoms and rights is partly due to the pervasive normalization of censorship. Across media platforms, news outlets, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and public and private spaces, governments, powerful corporations, and influential pressure groups are suppressing freedom of expression and censoring viewpoints deemed to be unpopular or dangerous. Unfortunately, physical assaults, legal restrictions, and retaliation against journalists, students, and faculty alike have become all too common, resulting in the suppression of dissenting voices and, more broadly, the muffling and disappearance of critical information, controversial topics, and alternative narratives from public discourse.
We collaborated with an accomplished group of international scholars and journalists to document this disturbing trend in Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression (Peter Lang 2024). Our collective work analyzed contemporary and historical methods of censorship and anti-democratic impulses that threaten civil society, human rights, and freedoms of information and expression around the world today. The collection explains how a rising tide of political tyranny coupled with the expansion of corporate power is stifling dissent, online expression, news reporting, political debate, and academic freedom from the United States and Europe to the Global South.
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The Assault on Press Freedom
Our volume reveals an epidemic of censorship and attacks on journalists and free speech around the globe. Although completed prior to the horrifying atrocities of October 7, 2023, in Israel, the text provides context for understanding that Israeli violence against Palestinians since October 7, including the murder of journalists, has been decades in the making. This strategy initially took hold with the assassination of the veteran Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American, as she documented Israel’s occupation of Jenin. The world has now witnessed the full flowering of the Israeli-state aggression against Palestinians that led to her murder. To date, Israel has killed more than 100 media workers in Gaza, raising the concern and outrage of numerous press freedom organizations and seventy UN member states that have now called for international investigations into each one of the murders. As the International Federation of Journalists reported, “Killing journalists is a war crime that undermines the most basic human rights.”
Journalists around the globe are repeatedly targeted because their profession, which is protected constitutionally in many nations, exists to draw attention to abuses of power. Thus, it is no surprise that the rise in global censorship has entailed the targeting of journalists with violence, imprisonment, and harassment. In Russia, journalists are jailed and die in custody, as they do in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong. In Mexico, there are “silenced zones,” controlled by a deadly collaboration between drug gangs and government corruption, where journalists are routinely killed. In 2022, Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists outside of a war zone.
The assault on press freedom has also been normalized in self-proclaimed democracies such as the United Kingdom, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned for more than five years, and in the United States, which has targeted Assange with espionage charges simply for promoting freedom of information. Although US presidents and other national figures often refer to the United States as “the leader of the free world,” the United States now ranks 55th in the world on the Reporters without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
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Repression of Artists and Academics
News outlets and their workers are not the only targets of the current wave of repression. Hollywood has long been shaped—and censored—by government and corporate power. For example, our book includes a chapter on the Pentagon’s long-standing influence on Hollywood, which has resulted in the film industry abandoning production of hundreds of films deemed unacceptable by the military.
In addition to media, educators and academics are increasingly subject to repressive measures that muzzle freedom of information and expression. Scholars and institutions of higher education sometimes produce research that challenges the myths and propaganda perpetuated by those in power. And even when they don’t, autonomy from micromanagement by government authorities and private funders is a prerequisite for the integrity of scholarly research and teaching, which tends to make elites exceedingly nervous. This is why universities and academic freedom are increasingly under siege by autocratic regimes and right-wing activists from Hungary to Brazil and from India to Florida.
Alarmingly, the latest Academic Freedom Index found that more than 45 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries with an almost complete lack of academic freedom (more than at any time since the 1970s). In Brazil, the government of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro attempted to ban education about gender and sexuality, slashed budgets for the country’s universities, and threatened to defund the disciplines of philosophy and sociology. In 2018, Hungary’s conservative Fidesz government shut down graduate programs in gender studies, forced the country’s most prestigious university, the Central European University, to relocate to Austria, and sparked months of protests at the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest by making unpopular changes to the school’s board of trustees. Something similar happened in Turkey, where, since 2016, the ruling regime has suspended thousands of professors and administrators from their university posts for alleged ties to the outlawed Gülen movement and shut down upwards of 3,000 schools and universities. Meanwhile, in the United States, several Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted draconian laws prohibiting or severely limiting teaching about race, sexuality, and gender in college classrooms. Under the influence of its arch-conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, Florida eliminated sociology as a core general education course at all of its public universities.
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Big Tech Censorship
Censorship is nothing new, but the pervasive influence of the internet and the development of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) have created new, more nefarious opportunities to crack down on freedoms around the globe. So-called smart platforms and tools have created new forms of Big Tech control and content moderation, such as shadowbanning and algorithmic bias. Regimes have set up a form of quid pro quo with tech companies, demanding certain concessions such as removing unfavorable content in exchange for government access to otherwise private information about tech platforms’ users. For example, in the United States, tech companies depend on largegovernmentcontracts and, as a result, often work with government officials directly and indirectly to censor content. Nor do they block only false or misleading content. Social media platforms have also been found to censor perfectly valid scientific speculation about the possible origin of COVID-19 and instances of obvious political satire.
These restrictive practices are at odds with Big Tech PR campaigns that trumpet the platforms’ capacity to empower users. Despite this hype, critical examination reveals that privately controlled platforms seldom function as spaces where genuine freedom of information and intellectual exchange flourish. In reality, Big Tech works with numerous national regimes to extend existing forms of control over citizens’ behaviors and expression into the digital realm. People are not ignorant of these abuses and have taken action to promote freedom across the globe. However, they have largely been met by more censorship. For example, as social media users took to TikTok to challenge US and Israeli messaging on Gaza, the US government took steps to ban the platform. Relatedly, Israel raided Al Jazeera’s office in East Jerusalem, confiscated its equipment, shuttered its office, and closed down its website.
Our book also details the complex history and structures of censorship in Myanmar, Uganda, and the Philippines, and popular resistance to this oppression. To this catalog of examples, we can add India’s periodic internet shutdowns aimed at stifling protests by farmers, the blocking of websites in Egypt, and the right-wing strongman Jair Bolsonaro’s persecution of journalists in Brazil. Each of these cases is best understood as a direct result of a rise in faux populist, right-wing authoritarian politicians and political movements, whose popularity has been fostered by reactionary responses to decades of neo-liberal rule.
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What Is to Be Done?
Censorship is being driven not only by governments but also by an array of political and corporate actors across the ideological spectrum, from right-wing autocrats and MAGA activists to Big Tech oligarchs and self-professed liberals. Indeed, when it comes to censorship, a focus on any one country’s ideology, set of practices, or justifications for restricting expression risks missing the forest for the trees. The global community is best served when we collectively reject all attempts to suppress basic freedoms, regardless of where they emerge or how they are implemented.
To counter increasing restrictions on public discourse and the muzzling of activists, journalists, artists, and scholars, we need global agreements that protect press freedom, the right to protest, and accountability for attacks on journalists. Protection of freedom of expression and the press should be a central plank of US foreign policy. We need aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up giant media companies that today wield the power to unilaterally control what the public sees, hears, and reads. We also need to create awareness and public knowledge to help pass legislation, such as the PRESS Act, that will guarantee journalists’ right to protect their sources’ confidentiality and prevent authorities from collecting information about their activities from third parties like phone companies and internet service providers.
Moreover, widespread surveillance by social media platforms and search engines, supposedly necessary to improve efficiency and convenience, ought to be abandoned. All of us should have the right to control any non-newsworthy personal data that websites and apps have gathered about us and to ask that such data be deleted, a right that Californians will enjoy starting in 2026.
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In addition, we should all support the efforts of organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, Article 19, and many others to fight back against encroachments on academic and intellectual freedom.
Supporters of free expression should also vigilantly oppose the ideologically motivated content moderation schemes Big Tech companies so often impose on their users.
Rather than trusting Big Tech to curate our news feeds, or putting faith in laws that would attempt to criminalize misinformation, we need greater investment in media literacy education, including education about the central importance of expressive rights and vigorous, open debate to a functioning democracy. The era of the internet and AI demonstrates the urgent need for education and fundamental knowledge in critical media literacy to ensure that everyone has the necessary skills to act as digital citizens, capable of understanding and evaluating the media we consume.
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