Quick takes today.
Robert Reich, 22 Dec 2025: Farewell to “60 Minutes”, subtitled “It just went the way of the Washington Post’s editorial page”
Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.
David Ellison’s CBS — after gutting DEI policies there, appointing right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and making anti-“woke” opinion journalist Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News (despite her lack of experience in either broadcasting or newsrooms) — yesterday removed a segment from “60 Minutes” featuring stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador. Bari Weiss had demanded changes to the segment.
The Ellisons — fils et père — have been seeking Trump’s support for their hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, but Trump has been unhappy with recent episodes of “60 Minutes,” even under its new management. Hence, the segment’s removal.
That’s how these people work.
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And this.
The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 23 Dec 2025: Cancel Culture’s Boomerang Effect subtitled “How we got to a place where free speech means whatever conservatives want to say”
On Sunday night Bari Weiss, the editor of The Free Press and the new head of CBS News, abruptly stopped a forthcoming 60 Minutes report on the torture endured by migrants in the brutal El Salvadoran prison CECOT, where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men.
Trump supporters praised the decision from Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as “horrific,” had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer. More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship.
Earlier examples with lots of links:
Weiss has long been a vocal supporter of a curiously narrow definition of free speech. That hypocrisy, shared by many, brought us to where we are today: Nasty tweets were a harbinger of incipient totalitarianism, but now the Trump administration is trying to imprison and deport people for pro-Palestinian advocacy, and it’s fine. The “PC Police” were trying to “outlaw make-believe,” but when Republican states ban books from schools and public libraries, it’s fine. These dumb lefties believe that words are violence, but when the federal government says left-wing speech is violence worthy of firing or prosecution, it’s fine. Protests on college campuses were a national crisis, but now that the federal government wants to ensure that entire universities comply with right-wing ideology when it comes to whom they hire, what they teach, and whom they admit, it’s fine.
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The Week, 23 Dec 2025: Trump unveils new ‘Trump class’ US warships
Everything must be named after himself. He has no shame. But here’s a pertinent bit of the summary here:
“This ship is never going to sail,” Mark Cancian, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Washington Post. He predicted it would “take four, five, six years” to just develop the ship.
Just like someone predicted that ballroom will never be built. (Also, whatever happened to that Wall?)
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And this:
JMG (from Fortune): Trump: I’m Designing Ships, I’m Very Aesthetic Person.
To which I say: Dunning-Kruger.
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Two more:
JMG, (from Raw Story): Trump: I’m Bringing Down Drug Prices By 3000%
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Friendly Atheist, 23 Dec 2025: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders turned a holiday email to state employees into a Christian sermon, subtitled “Sanders’ proclamation violated the idea of church/state separation by treating Christian doctrine as state policy”
My thought about such events: are Christians like her dim (because they don’t understand separation of church and state) or simply arrogant (thinking only their religion matters)?
