The D.C. political and media establishment spent the last four years painting Donald Trump as some kind of freak aberration. And now that he’s been defeated, the conventional wisdom is that the grown-ups are back in charge and everyone else can go back to brunch.
But the agenda of the military-industrial complex and its bipartisan backers hasn’t changed: Endless wars. Corporate corruption. Dystopian surveillance.
Trump’s rise to power was the direct result of a failing democracy and a broken economic system, and those forces haven’t gone anywhere. This is no time for journalists to let down our guard.
That’s why, while others take a victory lap, The Intercept is drawing up plans to expand our coverage — growing our team and launching new investigations that hold leaders accountable for their actions, regardless of party.
There’s just one problem: So far we’re still far short of our ambitious year-end fundraising goal.
We understand that many people who’ve given before aren’t able to do so right now, and that’s OK. But that means we’re all the more dependent on those who can afford to be generous.
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In many ways, our job at The Intercept gets harder now that Trump is gone. It was easy to convince people about the brutality of U.S. policy with a cartoonish villain like Trump at the helm.
But when we reported on the Obama administration’s drone wars and mass deportations, it made a lot of powerful enemies.
That’s OK — the enemies we’ve made are a badge of honor — but it means we’re now counting on our most loyal readers and listeners to help challenge the Biden administration’s emerging corporatist and hawkish agenda.
The Democratic leadership claiming victory in the election is the same Democratic leadership that regularly supported expansion of Trump’s military and surveillance powers — just as they did under Barack Obama and under George W. Bush.
We can expect that the Biden-Harris administration will continue to funnel money into the military-industrial complex, lining the pockets of defense contractors and lobbyists. The war machine rolls on.
Thank you,