Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win; The Guardian, March 16, 2025

Hannah Al-Othman , The Guardian; Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

"Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.

Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.

“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.

“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”

“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”...

Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.

“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.

Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”

“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.

He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”...

But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.

“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.

“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.

Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.

“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”

But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.

“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”

“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.”"

Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed; The Guardian, February 27, 2025

Robert Reich, The Guardian; Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed

"One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it is revealing the putrid connections between great wealth and great power for all to see.

Oligarchs are fully exposed and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal codes” key on older computers that let you see everything.

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in America, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, announced that the paper’s opinion section would henceforth focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets”.

Anything inconsistent with this view would not be published, according to his statement. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned, as he should have...

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter in 2022, laid off everyone who was filtering out hateful crap on the platform, renamed it X and turned it into a cesspool of lies in support of Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry.

All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are.

They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer.

They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them.

When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble."

Jeff Bezos’s Hypocritical Assertion of Power; The Atlantic, February 26, 2025

Joshua Benton, The Atlantic; 

Jeff Bezos’s Hypocritical Assertion of Power

His decision will only make The Washington Post a weaker institution. 

"But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering, and this decision can only make the Post a weaker institution.

Let’s get the motivation out of the way. This is the same Jeff Bezos who decided to cancel the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election—a move that led more than 250,000 paying Post readers to cancel their subscriptions within days. The same Bezos who flew to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to Donald Trump after the election. The same Bezos whose Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary—the most it had ever paid for a doc, nearly three times what any other studio offered, and more than 70 percent of whichwill go directly into Trump’s pockets. All of that cash seems to have served as a sort of personal seat license for Bezos, earning him a spot right behind the president at the inauguration. The tech aristocracy’s rightward turn is by now a familiar theme of the postelection period, and it doesn’t take much brain power to see today’s announcement as part of the same shift."

Dying in Darkness: Jeff Bezos Turns Out the Lights in the Washington Post’s Opinion Section; Politico, February 26, 2025

MICHAEL SCHAFFER , Politico; Dying in Darkness: Jeff Bezos Turns Out the Lights in the Washington Post’s Opinion Section

"In personally announcing that he was dramatically re-orienting the editorial line, and in fact wouldn’t even run dissenting views, Bezos added another sharp example to a narrative that represents a grave threat to the Post’s image: The idea that its owner is messing around with the product in order to curry favor with his new pal Donald Trump, who has the power to withhold contracts from Amazon and other Bezos companies.

The paper’s image is not some abstract question for journalism-school professors. It’s a matter of dollars and cents. If readers don’t trust a publication’s name, no amount of Pulitzer-worthy scoops will fix it. For Bezos, a guy who believes that the Post needs to gain a broad-based audience, it’s a baffling blind spot...

Owners may get the final say at publications they own, but the wisest among them have let their newsrooms and editorial boards make their own decisions without fear or favor. That’s to prevent the very impression that Bezos is making — that of a mogul trying to disguise his own predilections as independent thought...

Yet even as leadership talked about amping up readership, the owner personally alienated real and potential readers: first by spiking the endorsement, then by showing up in the line of moguls at Trump’s inauguration and now by declaring that the publication would have one editorial line for all of its contributors. It all made his publication look wimpy, or possibly corrupt.

Instead of being an occasionally fussy repository of mostly mainstream points of view, the venerable publication’s opinion pages now risk looking like a vessel for a very rich owner to curry favor with the man who runs the government. It’s going to be hard to keep that image from sticking to the whole organization — including the non-wimpy, non-corrupt reporting corps that keep digging up scoops on the administration.

Bezos, of all people, should know this: He’s the branding whiz who came up with “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Among many journalists, Wednesday’s bombshell announcement is being debated as a matter of media ethics: Was Bezos within his rights as an owner to call the tune on opinion matters? Or was this type of process meddling a violation of norms that go back at least to the 1950s?...

“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” he added. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”

Sounds good late at night in the dorm room. But does said freedom include, say, the freedom to start a union at an Amazon warehouse? Or run a business without worrying that some monopolistic e-commerce behemoth is going to drive you under? Come to think of it, these sound like great subjects for energetic debate on a pluralistic op-ed page somewhere. Too bad Bezos, instead of embracing the great American history of arguing about freedom, announced that he’s not so keen on debate."

Look at Donald Trump and his gang of broligarchs – and tell me we don’t need a wealth tax; The Guardian, February 25, 2025

Brian Cox , The Guardian; Look at Donald Trump and his gang of broligarchs – and tell me we don’t need a wealth tax

"Among the clique were the three richest men in the world: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and top dog Elon Musk, who personally poured $277m into Trump’s election campaign, increasing his own wealth by $170bn as a result...

I’m someone who has lived with both poverty and wealth – but increasingly people from my working-class background will not be given the opportunities afforded to me. Because wealth is becoming more concentrated, cronyism is growing and the rest of the world is suffering.

Some at least are calling it out. Last month, nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires signed a letter asking leaders at Davos to take action on extreme wealth – by taxing the super-rich, like them. And, in his farewell speech, the then US president, Joe Biden, warned of a dangerous oligarchy taking shape. This should be a wake-up call to us all – especially those people elected to represent us.

Governments must address the obscene political capture we are witnessing. One simple way to do this is to tax the super-rich. These people now manage so much more than money. They manage what we read, what we watch, the information we’re given and, ultimately, how we vote."