THE RISE OF FASCISM AND THE TABLOIDIZATION OF GOVERNMENT

Now they're talking about suspending habeas corpus.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, said on Friday that the administration was considering suspending immigrants’ right to challenge their detention in court before being deported.

“The Constitution is clear,” he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, “could be suspended in time of invasion.”

“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said....

Actually, there is no "clear" constitutional mandate for a suspension of habeas corpus. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

As an analysis of this clause from the Constitution Center notes, previous U.S. governments have invoked this clause only on rare occasions:

The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended four times since the Constitution was ratified: throughout the entire country during the Civil War; in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during a 1905 insurrection; and in Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

That analysis also tells us:

The Clause does not specify which branch of government has the authority to suspend the privilege of the writ, but most agree that only Congress can do it.

Congress ratified Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War, and

On every other occasion, the executive has proceeded only after first securing congressional authorization.

I'd like to point out that this analysis was written by Amy Coney Barrett when she was an appeals court judge, in collaboration with Neal Katyal. I hope this means she'll be a vote against granting Trump the unilateral power to suspend habeas if that question reaches the Supreme Court, though I wouldn't bet the rent money on it.

Barrett and Katyal note that habeas has been suspended nationwide only once, during the Civil War, and locally only under extreme circumstances. The administration appears to be arguing that we're in a public safety emergency so dire that it justifies another habeas suspension, even as the administration is also arguing that it has effectively sealed the border and stopped the "invasion."

But at least 40% of the public will probably accept the notion that we're experiencing an invasion so dire that it justifies the suspension of a fundamental civil liberty. I think I know why.

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil.

To the target audience for Fox and Fox-style tabloid news, the presence of undocumented immigrants in America really is a crisis at the level of the Civil War or Pearl Harbor, because over the years the audience has consumed hundreds of emotion-stirring stories demonizing immigrants. The Trump administration is shutting down or crippling parts of the government that do non-glamorous but critically important things Americans depend on -- but none of that stirs the blood of the Fox audience the way the presence of border crossers does. So we'll get extreme "emergency" immigration measures even as disease prevention and VA services and medical research falter.

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

So here's the president of the United States:

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.

... with Trump, there is added concern as he is known not to read the accompanying briefing document, referred to as “the book,” that is put together by intelligence analysts in a highly labor-intensive process. This document is delivered in hard copy or on a tablet device to the president and his key advisers five days a week.

In imitation of the master, here's the FBI director:

FBI Director Kash Patel has alarmed some members of the bureau by taking what they say is an overly casual approach to the role....

For decades, the FBI chief has received an 8:30 a.m. daily “director’s brief” with the most important information gathered from thousands of agents and analysts. Patel reportedly had trouble making the morning briefing, so it was dropped from five days a week to two.

“Even that has been a struggle,” an unnamed official told NBC....

Patel also ended a long-standing practice of holding secure weekly video conferences with field office leaders across the country, according to NBC. The meetings were considered a crucial way to share information and priorities across the bureau....

There’s a “growing sense among the ranks that there’s a leadership void, and that the highest echelons of the bureau are more concerned about currying favor with the president, retribution and leaks than the actual work,” Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who co-founded Justice Connection, a group dedicated to supporting current and former DOJ employees, told NBC.

Patel has recently bragged about arresting a state judge presiding over an immigration case and was dressed down by a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing for failing to put together a budget request.

Trump, Patel, and others in the administration -- Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem -- have such severe cases of Fox brain that they don't even seem to believe it's their job to do the tedious, non-headline-grabbing grunt work that their predecessors prioritized. They think their job is to provide blood-stirring content, whether it's Noem posing in front of shirtless caged men with tattoos in El Salvador or Hegseth doing push-ups with troops while boasting that the troops are "tough, disciplined, ready to fight." If you watch Fox, you think its emotion-stirring content is the news; in the same way, these top government officials thinks revving up emotions is their job.

Sometimes this thinking leads to empty photo ops. Other times it leads to brutality. But it's all driven by a tabloid sense of what's important and what isn't. And the stirring of blood could continue until we have no civil liberties and no functioning government at all.