The Lever - 📺 Fox News’ rare moment of candor

🔥 Today's Lever story (attached below): Fox News just screamed the quiet part.

🎧 On Lever Time: The Supreme Court decision that got us into this mess.

⬇️ Spend four minutes reading this 1,001-word newsletter to learn about:

• Why we need less gas stations.
• Uber’s fight to legally trick you.
• Government efficiency we can all get behind.
• Elon Musk’s personal return-on-investment.
• Common sense gun control in an unexpected place.

💥 Cuomo’s bid to blow up ethics is denied. Last week, a New York Appeals Court denied former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempt to get the state’s oversight and ethics body declared unconstitutional after the board opened a probe into Cuomo’s $5.1 million pandemic-era book deal earnings. The court ruling ensures the panel’s investigation into Cuomo can continue as he stages his potential comeback in the Big Apple. 

😵‍💫 Trump’s CFPB lets digital loan predator off the hook. Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the top federal consumer protection watchdog, dismissed its own case against digital lender SoLo after previously accusing the fintech company of illegally deceiving borrowers with false promises of zero-interest loans — similar to predatory “earned-wage” apps. Russell Vought, acting CFPB head, defended SoLo’s “innovation” and argued that “the weaponization of ‘consumer protection’ must end.”

🚘 Uber says it has a First Amendment right to trick you. The rideshare giant has filed a lawsuit aiming to invalidate new state laws requiring the company to fully disclose fees to customers and the estimated distance of trips to drivers. In its filing, Uber argued that providing drivers more details about the trips would lead to distracted driving.

• This case is the latest in corporations’ new line of so-called “compelled speech” cases detailed by The Lever — they all argue that it is unconstitutional for the government to force companies to speak (read: disclose what they’re doing to you).

💲 Turns out, taxing the rich works. A recent IRS review of audits conducted between 2016 and 2021 found that probes of taxpayers who reported income greater than $10 million “were generally more productive” than lower income ranges, yielding four times more dollars assessed per return and two times more dollars assessed per hour. Government efficiency at its finest.

🤑 Elon’s already cashing in. After dropping nearly $300 million supporting Trump and his allies in 2024, Musk’s personal wealth has increased 50 percent since Election Day, sending his net worth soaring toward $400 billion. Moreover, Musk’s businesses have gained a combined $613 billion in valuation since Nov. 5, according to a Bloomberg analysis. In the words of the inimitable economist Richard D. Wolff, it pays to buy a U.S. President.

Keep your data private.

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The top 10 percent of U.S. earners now account for nearly half of all the country’s spending. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

Alabama’s arms race slows down. A bipartisan coalition of mayors, lawmakers, and law enforcement in the Cotton State endorsed a public safety package last week that would ban devices used to convert semiautomatic weapons into machine guns, after a gunman used a conversion device in a mass shooting in Birmingham last year. Alabama has some of the nation’s weakest gun safety protections and one of the highest rates of gun deaths.

Image courtesy of Canva.

Gas stations are a scourge — cities are fighting back. Last week, Denver became the latest city to restrict the construction of new gas stations. I personally urged my city councilor to change these zoning laws after my residential neighborhood saw the ninth — yes, ninth! — gas station installed instead of anything more useful and less toxic. In the process of getting involved (and testifying for the new ordinance!), I learned that gas station proliferation is a national scourge.

Gas stations are everywhere and they’re an underground mess. Gas stations are absolutely everywhere — and that ubiquity is an environmental disaster. As Grist reported, “almost every gas station eventually pollutes the earth beneath it,” and a little pollution goes a long way: “Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater.” In all, the government estimates that “more than half a million leaks have been confirmed around the country.” That includes a 2008 spill in Brooklyn which emitted more pollution than the Exxon Valdez disaster. 

They’re also an above-ground hazard. In 2018, researchers found that vaporous emissions from gas stations “were 10 times higher than estimates used in setback regulations that determine how close schools, playgrounds, and parks can be to the facilities.” Another study released last year found that “residence within close proximity to a petrol station, especially one with more intense refueling activity, was associated with an increased risk of childhood leukemia.”

Correcting the vehicle power imbalance. In light of these messes — and the cleanup costs often forced on taxpayers — more cities are looking to halt gas station proliferation, despite real estate investors’ protests (and lawsuit threats). These initiatives come as electric vehicles are making gas stations less necessary (“up to 80 [percent] of the fuel-retail network may be unprofitable in about 15 years,” reports Boston Consulting Group). As the capital city of the state with the largest new EV market share, Denver is now enacting a policy that could help fix the imbalance between EV charging station density and gas station density. 

– Sirota

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be.

That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion on July 1, 2024

🫥 Sure, what the hell. Someone not happy with President Trump hacked the office televisions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development this morning.

🎉 Democrats actually did something helpful. Find out how Republicans’ proposed cuts to Social Security will affect your community with this interactive website.

😢 Won’t someone think of the mergers and acquisitions? Meanwhile over on CNBC…   

The Democratic Party had people who were correct about everything — people who warned against the Iraq War, financial deregulation, NAFTA, and the party’s alienation from the working class.

Democratic elites and their media appendages then marginalized, purged, and deplatformed these folks in favor of Liz Cheney/“Principles First” types who were wrong about everything. 

And now, here we are.

 In a composite image, a still of Jesse Waters’ segment on Fox News is overlaid with images of Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and the X logo.

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When Fox News screams the quiet part, it’s worth listening and gleaning a lesson — especially when the network lets the old “fair and balanced” veneer drop and admits its real mission. 

“We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left,” said Fox’s prime time host Jesse Watters in a televised moment of candor. “It’s like grassroots guerilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”

There’s a trove of worthwhile books, documentaries, and podcast series tracing the construction of that conservative media machine. For years, conservatives have rolled their eyes, pretending it’s all just a deranged liberal conspiracy theory. But here was Watters — on Fox News’ own airwaves! — proudly admitting the conspiracy is real, while also mocking critics.

“They are using tactics from the 1990s — they are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies, screaming into the ether on MSNBC,” he said of the right’s opponents. “This is what you call top-down command and control, you get talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and it disappears.”

Watters was right to identify this as a fundamental “asymmetry” that explains why we’ve arrived at this historical pivot point.

As illustrated in The Lever’s investigative audio series Master Plan, the American right has for decades constructed a vast media infrastructure outside of — and pressuring — the Republican Party to embrace conservatives’ ideological agenda. 

By contrast, America’s center-left has mostly funded the Democratic Party, its politicians and its array of Washington-based nonprofits — while relying on billionaire- and corporate-owned elite media outlets as its information conduit. While there’s been election-cycle investment in Democratic Party organs that amplify whatever incoherence the party leaders happen to be spewing on a given day, the center-left’s foundations, philanthropists, and grassroots donors have made vanishingly little investment in independent media and journalism, especially the kind that scrutinizes oligarch power. 

The result: As the right wins elections, increases its vote share among working-class communities, lavishly funds its media machine, sells its agenda as populism, and implements its policies, the information ecosystem is a miasma of conservative bullshit, half-truths and lies — all while the center-left now finds itself on the verge of irrelevance. Anti-MAGA America is portrayed — and widely perceived — as a cadre of special-interest whiners pandering to a dwindling voting base of Karens and Chads obsessed with identity politics and not much else. 

In response to the caricaturing, liberal media whisperers are telling everyone to not “believe” their lying eyes about Trump’s power; tone policing the left; replatforming an establishment press that most Americans distrust; and trying to resurrect lucrative #Resistance business models — even as reality reminds us that Pod will not Save America. 

Democrats Can’t Fail, They Can Only Be Failed

Amid Donald Trump’s unprecedented rampage, center-left donors are now bored and demoralized. The Democratic Party — mostly unburdened by independent media pressure because it’s made sure it barely exists — is loathed by most Americans, while serving as a de facto country club offering status perks to its emeritus leaders. 

As for neoconservatives purged from the Republican monstrosity they helped create — rather than apologizing for igniting the political inferno that’s now raging out of control, these arsonists are busy rebranding themselves as the principled firefighters saving the day. 

Meanwhile, progressives are relegated to trumpeting crowd sizes at rallies for Bernie Sanders, who is certainly delivering a much-needed message about oligarchy but whose political apparatus has never succeeded in (or shown sustained commitment to) channeling his celebrity and fundraising power into building lasting institutions beyond the Vermont senator’s personal brand. 

Of course, unlike other Democratic luminaries signing Hollywood deals, feigning helplessness, and preemptively retreating, Sanders is at least trying to do something to catalyze a real opposition to the broligarchy and the Trump-Musk rampage. Like a rock star playing the hits on a last reunion tour, he’s generating some of the old energy, which is mildly encouraging — and far more than anything his sedated peers are doing. 

Sanders could still end up being to center-left populism what Barry Goldwater was to conservatism — a prickly senator-turned-presidential-candidate who lacked the political and organizational skills to win a national election, but who nonetheless inspired a larger movement. But in Goldwater’s case, the movement was fueled not just by ephemeral rallies, but also by conservative institution-building outside both parties. 

That has not occurred on a center-left where donors, nonprofits, foundations, labor unions, and advocacy groups are still afraid - or explicitly opposed – to trying to build anything more than the Democratic Party’s message machine — a machine which promised “nothing will fundamentally change” and which insists Democrats should never be pressured to do anything. In the party’s telling, Democrats can never fail, they can only be failed. 

At this late hour for democracy, it should be obvious that more of such Democratic Party-aligned pink-slime media is probably not the answer to the information-war asymmetry that Watters described. Building a louder, more aggressive (and annoying) Democratic Party megaphone was tried in the early 2000s and it delivered Air America, some Beltway think tanks, a handful of new cable TV shows, and agitprop for a left-punching Obama administration whose betrayals ended up creating the backlash conditions for Trump’s ascent.

Those endeavors are a cautionary tale reminding us that the solution to an information war is not more politburo-style propaganda in service of a party’s Dear Leaders or more anesthetizing pablum from corporate media’s consent manufacturers. Nor is the answer “acting like political communication is still just buying millions of TV and digital ads every two years,” as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) recently put it.

Daddy, What Did You Do In The Information War?

The fix is something much more difficult and nonpartisan: doing the hard work of creating information conduits that provide better, more accurate reporting about what’s really happening in America; that identify who in either party is responsible for the decisions enriching the rich and harming the rest of us; that orient coverage toward a working-class audience rather than an affluent audience; and that convey news to normies rather than only to already-converted, already-dialed-in political junkies.

That’s what we’ve been trying to do at The Lever — and you’ll notice that we do not identify our work as “left” or “progressive.” That’s a deliberate choice. Sure, I have my personal views about the world, but we are in the business of old-fashioned, fact-checked, document-based, accountability journalism — and that kind of reporting is not an ideological or partisan crusade. 

We aren’t alone — we’re part of a larger movement of independent, reader-funded outlets that includes The American Prospect, Democracy Now! The Guardian, Drop Site, ProPublica, and 404 Media (to name a few). Our outlets operate in the tradition of muckraker I.F. Stone, honor the outlook most famously articulated by Joseph Pulitzer, invest in original journalism rather than hot takes, and make real-world impact.

Our distribution doesn’t rely solely on algorithmically rigged, billionaire-owned social media platforms, and we are actual organizations rather than single-writer Substacks — meaning we are all trying to build lasting institutions larger than any one voice. 

Though dwarfed by the conservative media machine, our outlets’ slow-but-steady success suggests that in the information war, there can be a much stronger counterforce than the tried-and-failed Democratic Party media schemes of the past. That is, if our outlets are able to continue finding resources for the work (sidenote: Stay tuned for some exciting news later this week about The Lever’s expansion).

To be sure, a more vibrant, independent media focused on accountability journalism will never be the singular bulwark protecting a democratic society. The fight against corporatism, authoritarianism, and fascism requires a society-wide struggle. But those ‘isms’ are typically more able to flourish and spread when independent media is defunded, snuffed out, or prevented from ever existing in the first place. 

So, then, what is the lesson from Fox News’ admission? To paraphrase the old British recruitment poster: What should you do in the great information war?

One answer is this: If and when you can, chip in to independent media outlets — specifically, the ones that do original reporting rather than just opinion, and the ones that are building lasting organizations rather than just platforming single voices. It’s a miracle such outlets even exist — and they cannot survive and grow without reader support. At the absolute minimum, don’t complain or get offended or send an angry email when those outlets periodically ask for your help.

No, independent media is not guaranteeing you a quick fix like politicians’ spammy fundraising appeals that fill up your email box. 

No, it is not offering you an overnight panacea — the work we’re doing isn’t fast and there are no short cuts. It’s a slog.

But yes, we are fighting the good fight in an information war that threatens our future — which is why this work deserve your attention and your support.

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