Yesterday's group session was, let us say, interesting. Since this is 90 minutes of non-therapy, I have taken to it as a learning experience. Everyone else is working class, and in the majority younger than me.
All but the last 10 minutes was chatter and checking in. The las t10 minutes was the leader reciting from some text about sexual arousal - controlling it so it is proper. I'm thinking, how does this apply to me or my crime? No arousal in the crime; ultimately, an overwhelming repulsion. Looking back, I had a lot of women just ask me if wanted to have sex. Not in such polite terms. Not sure how that fits into the lecture. Was it improper to say no? I suppose if this class is meant to instill Victorian morality in us. I am not sure if that is not its purpose.
More interesting to me was learning how the younger generation get their news, and how they interpret it as liberal or conservative.
The former will take fewer words to discuss. My analogy concluding the chat was that I knew my news sources like I knew music as an album, and the younger generation gets their news as singles. What I did not say then was what I worried about 16 years ago when I had set up a bunch of RSS feeds was limiting my view of the news. Now, it seems to be the algorithm that brings the news in single stories instead of as part of a full publication. No one saw that as a problem.
What took longer was talking about media bias. The person leading the group read an article from The Atlantic, Fentanyl Doesn’t Come Through the Caribbean. He kept making the point that now drug traffickers would know to use the water route for its product. Although I made the point that Mexican fentanyl producers had enough land route to import their goods and did not need to use the water, I did not know about the sub-headline until today: "The White House is using the opioid epidemic to justify lethal strikes and other policies." Now, I worry about his reading skills (he says he has a Master's degree), and/or his candor. This is not an alert to drug traffickers (being a billion-dollar business, probably have better ideas on what are and are not the best routes for its products - better than any layperson). And since only the following paragraphs are open to the public -
“Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” President Donald Trump said during his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, issuing a politely phrased mortal threat to would-be drug traffickers. Already, the administration has killed 17 people—“narco-terrorists,” Trump calls them—in air strikes on three boats allegedly from Venezuela and loaded with what the president has described as “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl.”
Trump and his aides have justified the extrajudicial killings as a decisive measure to protect Americans from dangerous drugs, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid behind the worst overdose epidemic in U.S. history, which accelerated during his first term in office.
- the thesis would appear to be about the excuses Trump is using to blow up Venezuelan boats are baseless. Huh. How our leader construed this as far-left propaganda seems even stranger today.
He went to a media bias site - the name of which I cannot recall - that listed The Atlantic as far left.
Having been a reader, a subscriber, and now a subscriber again of The Atlantic, I found this bizarre. The Atlantic has always stood for solid reporting, until recently now even taking much of a political stance, and steering a middle course. I asked him about The Nation and Jacobin. Neither were found to be as far left as The Atlantic. I do wish I could recall the name of the site he used.
I almost took umbrage at him balancing The Nation with The Federalist Society. Now, it seems strange that he pulled that particular name out of the air. It was in the sense of balancing propaganda.
I went looking for my own sources for media bias
Media Bias/Fact Check: The Atlantic: LEFT-CENTER BIAS; LEFT-CENTER (-3.3)
Overall, we rate The Atlantic Left-Center Biased due to editorial positions and High for factual reporting based on excellent sourcing of information and a reasonable fact-check record.
Media Bias/Fact Check: The Nation - LEFT BIAS; LEFT (-6.4)
verall, we rate The Nation Left Biased due to story choices and wording that favor the left and factually high based on proper sourcing.
Media Bias/Fact Check: Jacobin - LEFT (7.0)
Overall, we rate Jacobin Magazine, Left Biased, based on story selection and editorial positions that always favor the Democratic Socialist Left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing of information and a clean fact check record.
Media Bias/Fact Check: The National Review
Overall, we rate the National Review Right Biased based on story selection that always favors the right and Mostly Factual in reporting due to a few misleading claims and occasional use of poor sources, and one failed fact check.
Allsides: The Atlantic - 4.69
The Atlantic was rated Left (-4.69) in the June/July 2025 Blind Bias Survey, confirming AllSides' Media Bias Rating at the time. A total of 644 people across the political spectrum rated the bias of The Atlantic.
Allsides The Nation -5
Allsides: Jacobin - 4
Allsides: The National Review 2.5 to the right
Let us look at what the magazines say about themselves;
When the founders of The Atlantic gathered in Boston in the spring of 1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable for the kind of reader who was deeply engaged with the most consequential issues of the day. The men and women who created this magazine had an overarching, prophetic vision—they were fierce opponents of slavery—but they were also moved to overcome what they saw as the limits of partisanship, believing that the free exchange of ideas across ideological lines was crucial to the great American experiment. Their goal was to publish the most urgent essays, the most vital literature; they wanted to pursue truth and disrupt consensus without regard for party or clique.
Here is the mission statement published in the very first issue of The Atlantic, in November 1857, and signed by many of the greats of American letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne:
First: In Literature, to leave no province unrepresented, so that while each number will contain articles of an abstract and permanent value, it will also be found that the healthy appetite of the mind for entertainment in its various forms of Narrative, Wit, and Humor, will not go uncared for. The publishers wish to say, also, that while native writers will receive the most solid encouragement, and will be mainly relied on to fill the pages of The Atlantic, they will not hesitate to draw from the foreign sources at their command, as occasion may require, relying rather on the competency of an author to treat a particular subject, than on any other claim whatever. In this way they hope to make their Periodical welcome wherever the English tongue is spoken or read.
Second: In the term Art they intend to include the whole domain of aesthetics, and hope gradually to make this critical department a true and fearless representative of Art, in all its various branches, without any regard to prejudice, whether personal or national, or to private considerations of what kind soever.
Third: In Politics, The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties, but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private.
In studying this original mission statement, we came to understand that its themes are timeless. The core principles of the founders are core principles for us: reason should always guide opinion; ideas have consequences, sometimes world-historical consequences; the knowledge we have about the world is partial and provisional, and subject to analysis, scrutiny, and revision.
Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.
Principled. Progressive. The Nation speaks truth to power to build a more just society.
Home to tenacious muckraking, provocative commentary, and spirited debate about politics and culture, The Nation empowers readers to fight for justice and equality. By providing a deeper understanding of the world as it is—and as it could be—we drive bold ideas into the conversation and ignite debates far beyond our pages.
We believe in intellectual freedom. We value facts and transparency. We argue that dissent is patriotic and we hold the powerful to account, no matter their political persuasion. We raise up the promise of a radical tomorrow while we agitate for meaningful change today. Above all, we aspire to galvanize a more informed public—one equipped with a more profound understanding of events, ideas, and history.
Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has long believed that independent journalism has the capacity to bring about a more democratic and equitable world. Our writers shift paradigms and open minds. Our deep investigative reporting launches congressional hearings, forces policy change, and shapes news cycles. Instigating progress: It’s not only our legacy, it’s our continued commitment to future generations of torchbearers.
The National Review (this was a bit harder to find than the above, as in non-intuitive)
National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. as a magazine of conservative opinion. The magazine has since defined the modern conservative movement and enjoys the broadest allegiance among American conservatives.
Today, National Review publishes a magazine 12 times a year in several formats, including print and digital. In the spirit of our mission and serious undertaking, National Review employs the brightest and best minds in conservative letters. National Review also produces a 24/7 website, www.nationalreview.com, which publishes conservative commentary on major political and cultural issues, both domestic and global, on a daily basis. This commentary may come in the form of articles or blog posts. National Review also publishes multiple slideshows, podcasts, and videos on its website every day.
Okay, if you are getting your news via algorithm, then you are not looking at these announcements of an editorial stance. But why are people not looking at a masthead? Because they never read magazines, or newspapers, or have any idea of a stated editorial position. What they seem to think nowadays is that all have a secret agenda for propaganda purposes. For me, it is not much of a secret. Nor has it ever been. Back in the day, it was known that the Indianapolis Star was more conservative than its sister publication, The Indianapolis News. Are people more stupid nowadays, or just never been trained and, therefore, are more ignorant?
The Federalist Society does not show up in any media bias site, but then it is not a media site. This is its statement of purpose:
Our Purpose
- Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
- The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.
- This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors. In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.
I could quibble away much of the above, starting with a liberal order putting us all in a straight-jacket. All I will say is that the proof is in the pudding as Trump and Federalist Society judges lead us into an autocratic government. I also turned up
THE BIG LIE: THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY
It’s no secret: the Supreme Court has morphed in the last few decades into an arch-conservative court where progressive, popular, and commonsense laws have often gone to die. From the end of Roe v. Wade, to a fundamental shift in how the courts have interpreted the second amendment, the court seems to have—almost all of the sudden—turned on a dime to roll back the rights we’ve worked so hard for. But it didn’t happen overnight. Behind this shift is a sometimes secretive national powerhouse working for decades to build a pipeline of conservative legal scholars and place them in the court system: The Federalist Society. For those of us in the gun safety movement, getting to know this powerful group is key to help build up our response, and protect gun safety laws.
The Society’s ties to the Supreme Court are extensive: five of the current nine justices on the Supreme Court are either current or past members, and many more in the lower courts are too. And their power is only set to grow under a second Trump administration. For decades, Republicans have looked to the Federalist Society’s ranks for judicial appointments, and under Trump’s first term, Trump all but outsourced his appointments to them. They’re aligned in a particular—and dangerous—way of applying the constitution called originalism, the idea that the constitution should be interpreted solely based on the intent of its framers in 1787. Seems reasonable, but it raises a fundamental question: who is interpreting that intent? And what about the ways society has fundamentally changed in the 250 years since? This vision has deadly consequences.
How the Federalist Society shaped America’s judiciary
By 2024, six of the nine Supreme Court justices considered themselves members or affiliates of the Federalist Society — the culmination of a longstanding pipeline connecting members of Federalist Society chapters at America’s top law schools to high-level judgeships and political offices.
But how exactly does this pipeline work, and how has it shaped conservative thought within the American judiciary?
The Federalist Society, a debating organization that hosts political events and acts as a network for conservative and libertarian students and professionals, was founded at Yale Law School in 1982 by three Yale alumni: Steven Calabresi ’80 LAW ’83, David McIntosh ’80 and Lee Liberman Otis ’79. Today, the Society is represented at all 204 ABA-accredited law schools in the country, has established communities of affiliated lawyers in 60 cities and has over 70,000 members.
***
“When you see that Leonard Leo … took a leave from the Federalist Society to actually go work in the Trump administration on judicial appointments, it just couldn’t be more explicit that there’s a strong tie between the society and our national judiciary,” Feldman said.
Leo, a self-identified conservative who has closely aligned himself with the Christian right, sees his ties with the Federalist Society as a means to realign national politics.
Leo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
After receiving $1.6 billion in donations from 2020 to 2022 from Barre Seid, who is a Federalist Society affiliate and political donor, Leo has outlined a plan for a conservative takeover of the courts.
“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” Leo told the Financial Times.
***
According to Feldman, should Trump win the 2024 election, Trump’s close ties to the Federalist Society’s network would ensure that any judge appointments within the next four years are members of the tight-knit society.
Two judges — Thomas, 72, and Alito, 74 — are approaching the age of retirement, and politicians expect a Supreme Court vacancy to open during the upcoming 60th presidency.
Alongside the presidential election, 305 appellate court seats are on the ballot in 2024, including 69 state supreme court seats this November. 32 of the candidates running for state supreme court positions are affiliated with the Federalist Society.
Not much there that would give any information to the average citizen, so not sure why it was recommended.
One other topic that flowed up yesterday was how personal people take their politics today. Of this, I am not sure that I got a satisfactory answer. What came back to me was that I was looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Where I thought anxiety was causing the thin-skinnedness of our politics, it seems that our politics creates the anxiety. Or is it that we have repressed our identities to fit in politically that creates the anxiety. Not sure that I do not have it all scrambled. Certainly, what went unaddressed was how I grew up without such a sharp line between the political parties on ideological matters. I would say that it was more procedural - everyone agreed on the creed of the Declaration of Independence, while having different views on how to implement that creed. Now, it seems to be more about accepting or rejecting the Declaration's ideals. I will say this of the left who want to lecture us on the morality of words, as well as the right who would have us return to a fantasy land of a prior age. The former fight over words without accomplishing any results. The other would mangle us into their shapes. The only good thing about the far left is that they hector without benefit of laws and/or guns, with which the far right points in our direction.
I will close out all this writing with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's How Can We Live Together? (The Boston Review). It is up to the people to put this mess aright. Laws will be ineffectual - they leave their own kind of martyr, that of the self-righteous victim. No, a society has it own tools. Snubbing, shaming those we find morally or politically or socially bankrupt is such a tool. No number of editorials in magazines aimed at the higher classes will cause as much change as us deciding that we will be free of those who are hateful to other human beings.
Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
This arrangement certainly risks some measure of injustice, inaccuracy, and overreach: a careless joke or comment here or there need not a bigot, much less a dyed-in-the-wool fascist, make. But admitting such possibilities, seeing this kind of basic social norm enforcement as fundamentally at odds with living in a free country is deeply delusional. Not everyone you go to school with is invited to your birthday party, not every coworker and neighbor to the cookout. Deciding the level of intimacy with which you will live with the people around you is an utterly mundane part of living in the world—yes, even a free world—and doing so on the basis of other people’s character and conduct informs those decisions for anyone with values that stretch beyond those of cynical self-protection and into the territory of things like “basic self-respect,” “respect for others,” and “basic integrity.” Russell was not infringing on Mosley’s freedom by deeming him unworthy of polite conversation—even if he had done so for questionable rather than principled reasons. He was simply exercising his own freedom, alongside a better set of values than Mosley had. A free world would expect as much: indeed, it would require it.
The point is that the possibility of overreach is a price worth paying exactly because shame serves as a robustly liberal alternative to the political violence that Klein and company rightly abhor. It is, quite literally, the least one can do to ensure rules of social conduct that upheld minimal levels of dignity for all involved. Most of the alternatives involve either subjugation, combat, or both. Put another way: designating disrespect and denigration as beyond the pale, as grounds for exclusion from polite company, is “turning the temperature down.” Klein and others are helping to turn it up.
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