I like to visit Tucson, Ariz., this time of year to get away from the cold. Winters are mild, and it hardly ever rains in the Sonoran desert there, averaging roughly 300 days of sunshine.
But when I was there last week, it felt as if a dark cloud were hovering. I kept being reminded about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of NBC’s Today show cohost Savannah Guthrie, who is a longtime resident. I checked for updates multiple times a day. Then, one overcast and rainy afternoon, I grabbed a notebook and went to Nancy’s home in the Catalina Foothills.
TV is a medium that creates false intimacy, making it feel as if we actually know the on-screen performers. I’ve watched Savannah Guthrie coanchor the Today show for years, but I have never met her. When I learned her mother had gone missing, my blood ran as cold as if she had been a closefriend.
I wondered if her family was targeted because of her work as a high-profile journalist. A Today show segment featuring Guthrie giving a tour of her hometown aired in November. It includes footage of the host’s mother and sister sipping tequila from teacups at a popular Mexican restaurant.
This image provided by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department shows a missing person alert for Nancy Guthrie.
The day I showed up outside the Guthrie residence, there were no law enforcement officials to interview about the status of the investigation. A lone sheriff’s vehicle was parked in the driveway, near Nancy’s front door, where a masked gunman had been caught on doorbell camera footage around the time investigators say she’s believed to have disappeared on Feb. 1. Blood splatters have been found outside.
A handful of spiky agave plants flanked a red gravel driveway. People haddropped off yellowroses, potted plants,and other offerings at a makeshift memorial out front. A sign reads, “Dear Guthrie Family, your neighbors stand with you.” Saguaro cacti tower over the scene.
Meanwhile, reporters and social media influencers milled about on the street, waiting for answers that never came.
If this had been a targeted kidnapping, Guthrie had said on video, “We will pay.” Why hasn’t Nancy been released? And is she even still alive?
Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong stands next to the Tucson, Ariz., memorial honoring Nancy Guthrie — the mother of the NBC “Today” show cohost Savannah Guthrie — who went missing Feb. 1.
Two things can be true simultaneously: As much as I felt my heart ache for the Guthrie family, I also spared a thought for other families who are waiting for their missing loved ones to come home, too.
I also couldn’t help but think that ifNancy Guthrie weren’t related to a celebrity, or if shewere a person of color, it’s doubtful we’d even know her name, much less that she was missing.
It’s also unlikely President Donald Trump would have bothered to offer his condolences and as many resources as he has, posting on Truth Social, “ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family’s, and Local Law Enforcement’s, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY.”
Meanwhile, there are so many other missing people whose cases could benefit from just a fraction of the attention Nancy’s case has attracted.
An estimated 2,300 children are reported missing every day in America. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems database currently lists 134 people — ranging from infantsto 85 years old — missing in Philadelphia County alone. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also snatches up countless undocumented immigrants whose loved ones frequently know only that they’ve suddenly gone missing.
Roz Pichardo, who runs the Missing in Philly page on Facebook, pointed out that when local people disappear, it often escapes the notice of the media or public officials. “No one is hardly looking at that page other than families who are searching for someone,” she told me.
Natalie Wilson, cofounder of the Black and Missing Foundation, agreed that not enough is done to find those who have disappeared. “Your observation about the media cycle is exactly why we stay so focused on our mission.”
None of this takes away from the Guthrie family’s nightmare. But their situation can help us understand how familiar the horror and accompanying heartache might be for people standing in line or sitting on the bus next to us.
What resources should we allocate locally to help those who are experiencing something similar to what the Guthrie family is going through? What ways can we make sure others who have disappeared get more attention and a share of our concern, as well?
My prayer is that any family with a missing loved one finds peace, including the Guthries. I hope my friend-in-my-head Savannah will wake up from this bad dream soon — and that Nancy will be safely returned to her beloved home in the Sonoran desert with her agave plants, cacti, spiny ocotillo, and some fresh yellow roses.
Regardless of frequently repeated claims, voter fraud is exceptionally rare, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act, would only prevent an extremely small number of ineligible votes. While the GOP claims the SAVE Act is an attempt to preserve voter integrity, they know statistically that this will create difficulties for certain classes of voters who often vote for Democrats. Studies have shown, for example, that documentation requirements will place a disproportionate burden on communities of color and those with low incomes. Restrictions on vote by mail are likely to suppress the vote from hourly and shift workers, the elderly, those with disabilities, and people who do not have easy access to transportation to the polls. In this same vein, not allowing people to vote by mail forces them to vote in person, where in some places they may have to deal with voter intimidation and harassment (threats from others, long lines without water, etc.). For years, Republicans have pursued harsh penalties for poll workers — a move that may discourage participation by volunteers and slow down voting on Election Day, which may deter some folks from voting (again, long election lines).
Let’s call it what it is: This is intentional voter suppression and an attack on our democracy.
Kent Kingan, Malvern
. . .
The League of Women Voters is absolutely correct in stating that the SAVE America Act, just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, would add a burden on voters to present documentary proof of citizenship and voter eligibility, a burden that could be substantial for many, to solve a problem that does not meaningfully exist. However, the organization goes too far in stating that Pennsylvania already has safeguards to ensure only eligible citizens vote, because federal law requires voters to attest to their citizenship when they register and “[e]lection officials verify identity and eligibility.” I have been a judge of elections in Philadelphia for more than a decade. With the exception of voters who must present identification because they have not previously voted in my election division, the only means election officials have to verify the identity and eligibility of someone seeking to vote is to ask for their name and address, confirm that that name and address is in our poll book of eligible voters, and then compare their signature with the signature that appears in the poll book, which is a copy of a signature recorded at the time the person with that name and address registered to vote. For some people, the two signatures are an easy match. But for others — indeed, the majority — not so much. This is especially the case with respect to people who registered years ago. And the problem has compounded since we started using electronic poll books, and voters are signing what is essentially an iPad, usually using a finger. Should I prohibit a person from voting because their signature on Election Day does not match the signature they recorded at the time they registered? Should I tell them they can only vote by provisional ballot? If I do not, can I honestly say I have verified the identity and eligibility of that person?
Jeff Braff,Philadelphia
Join the conversation: Send letters to letters@inquirer.com. Limit length to 150 words and include home address and day and evening phone number. Letters run in The Inquirer six days a week on the editorial pages and online.
Last month, a Pittsburgh-area man admitted in federal court that he made an online antisemitic threat to a public official.
“Go back to Israel or better yet, exterminate yourself and save us the trouble,” Edward Owens Jr. wrote on Facebook Messenger, adding, “we will not stop until your kind is nonexistent.”
This was not some random act — it is part of a larger issue of rising political violence, and an example of what many Jews encounter when they turn on their phones or scroll through their feeds.
The American Jewish Committee’s just-released “State of Antisemitism in America 2025 Report”lays bare the scope of the problem. Online is where American Jews experience antisemitism the most, with 73% seeing or hearing antisemitic content or being personally targeted.
Of those who experienced online antisemitism, 54% found it on Facebook — up 7 points from 2024 — while 38% experienced it on YouTube. That is an especially alarming number, given that it demonstrates an 11-point jump from the year before. Instagram and TikTok also saw concerning increases in reported antisemitic content.
What were once quiet murmurings are now getting very loud. Words matter. AJC’s report found that 55% of American Jews are altering their behavior out of fear of antisemitism. That includes the 39% who are not posting content online that could identify them as Jewish or reveal their views on Jewish issues.
It’s self-censorship as a means of self-preservation. You don’t know who is reading or who may be triggered by what you post. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reported that the FBI examined Owens’ phone and found searches tied to antisemitism and “Pittsburgh Jews.”
Owens also texted a friend that he was “ready to hunt down Jews for extermination.” Those may have just been the words of a bitter man who felt Jews were to blame for everything lacking in his life. But Owens also owned several guns, including a 9 mm pistol FBI agents found in his truck with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Noah Rubin, a Penn engineering student, during a “No hate on campus” rally at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024.
We don’t know whether Owens’ words would have turned into violence — the online threats and gun charges were handled separately in this case. However, we also don’t have the luxury of parsing whether someone is merely spewing venom to put a scare into people or is contemplating something more sinister.
Either way, it has an impact. AJC’s report found that 21% of American Jews who experienced antisemitism online felt physically threatened by these incidents.
Put yourself in the shoes of the official who received Owens’ message. Chances are you’ll be rattled by what you read and contact the authorities, who are better equipped to hunt down cowards like Owens who use online aliases. Then you’ll have a better idea of what it’s like to be an American Jew in 2026.
Jews in America had long been insulated from violent antisemitism. It was something that happened elsewhere. Then, the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were murdered, changed that and precipitated hundreds of incidents in which Jews have been targeted simply for being Jewish.
Last April, Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence was torched on the second night of Passover. As with the Owens case, this is what public officials who are also publicly Jewish are currently facing.
Owens is a sorry footnote in this spasm of hate. He will rightfully be forgotten after he is sentenced in April. But what we can’t forget is that he has plenty of company. Jewish or not, that should worry us all.
Marcia Bronstein is the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey regional office.
There’s an old saying that “only the good die young.” Not true, of course, but the sentiment is understandable given the complex twists and turns of any life, including that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights titan and noteworthy presidential candidate, who at age 84 died Tuesday at his home in Chicago.
The Rev. Jackson’s rise into America’s awareness was itself triggered by a death. He was with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis hotel in 1968 when an assassin’s bullet killed his mentor. Who knew then that the Rev. Jackson would become as forceful a voice for equality as King, and later, a credible though unsuccessful political candidate for the nation’s highest office?
Both the Rev. Jackson and King were gifted with voices that moved people to action, not just with their words, but with how they expressed them. King’s cadence perfected in sermons from pulpits across the South stirred the souls of folks who were cautioned to peaceably place their bodies in harm’s way to achieve dignity.
The Rev. Jackson more so appealed to people’s outrage as he urged protesters to let their oppressors know, “I am somebody!” Hearing the Rev. Jackson speak, you got the feeling that those three words meant more to him than the disparate treatment Black people were afforded in then-segregated America. It was true that some aspects of the Rev. Jackson’s life had also been a struggle.
Civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (right) and his aide, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, are seen in Chicago in August 1966.
Born in 1941 in Greenville, S.C., the mother of Jesse Louis Burns was a 16-year-old high school majorette who had been impregnated by a 33-year-old married man who lived next door, but denied his paternity. Two years later, Jesse’s mother married Charles Jackson, whom she met when he was a barbershop shoeshine man. Jackson sent the boy to live with his grandmother and didn’t adopt Jesse until he was 16 years old.
After high school, the Rev. Jackson enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship. After his freshman year, he transferred to North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black institution in Greensboro, N.C., where he became a leader in his Omega Psi Phi fraternity chapter and president of the student body. In those roles, the seeds of the Rev. Jackson’s dynamic activism were sown.
Earlier, the Rev. Jackson had been a member of the “Greenville Eight,” the eight African American students arrested for refusing to leave the then-segregated Greenville County Public Library. By 1965, he was marching with King in Selma, Ala., and in 1967 was named head of Operation Breadbasket, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference program developed to help poor Black communities across the nation.
The Rev. Jackson eventually left the SCLC after King’s death and, in 1971, created his own organization, Operation PUSH, and later the Rainbow Push Coalition, which became as involved in politics as it was with social justice. That political involvement is credited with being a factor in the 1983 election of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington.
President Jimmy Carter speaks with the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the White House in Washington, April 4, 1979.
The Rev. Jackson’s subsequent 1984 presidential campaign resonated with voters of all colors and backgrounds who agreed with him that America wasn’t doing enough “to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.”
The Rev. Jackson won 465 delegates to the 1984 Democratic National Convention and 1,218 delegates in 1988, both times far exceeding Shirley Chisholm’s 151 delegates when the New York member of Congress ran for president in 1972. But the Rev. Jackson never gave it a third shot. He instead spoke out for justice not just in this country but around the world, and, in 2000, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.
Those were good times, but life isn’t always good.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, with his wife, Jacqueline, concedes defeat in the Illinois Democratic primary on March 16, 1988, in Chicago.
Watching the Rev. Jackson in his final years, attending public events but barely able to move or speak, made you wish for a better summation of a life once so full of zest and vigor. But the Rev. Jackson has left behind vivid memories captured in print, video, and downloads of a man history should not forget. Memories of crowds screaming, “Run, Jesse, Run,” as the Rev. Jackson tried to fulfill a political dream left to be carried out by someone else. Thank God, Jesse did live to see that.
Jackson speaks at a Chicago news conference in February 2015.
Pick any of the seminal moments from Black history over the last six decades — from the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 to Barack Obama’s first speech as president-elect 40 years later — and the chances are that the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. was there, front and center.
Jackson had spoken to King only moments before the civil rights leader was fatally shot while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Even though he was only 26 years old, Jackson went on to position himself to take up the mantle of leading the civil rights movement.
Years later, Jackson explained to an interviewer, “What I was clear on was that we could not let one bullet kill the whole movement.” He used the analogy of an athletic event during which the best player gets hurt. The answer, he said, isn’t to forfeit the game: “You can’t run away. You’ve got to keep fighting.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (second from right) stands with Hosea Williams (left), Jesse Jackson (second from left), and Ralph Abernathy (right) on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, a day before he was assassinated while standing in approximately the same spot.
And that’s what he did for the rest of his life, advocating tirelessly for an end to racial injustice as well as for economic opportunities for poor people of all racial backgrounds through his iconic Rainbow coalition and during his two historic runs for the presidency.
Back when most Americans couldn’t conceive of a Black man becoming president of the United States, he could and tried to get the rest of us to believe in it, too. Jackson launched his first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and again in 1988.
Jackson rarely gets the credit, but his run for the White House helped lay the groundwork for the election of Obama, who fulfilled Jackson’s vision.
And, yes, when Obama gave his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008, Jackson was there, too. While Obama spoke, Jackson could be seen holding a miniature American flag with tears streaming down his cheeks.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or Medgar Evers” — the civil rights leader who was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963 — “could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” Jackson later told the Associated Press about his emotions that night. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Jackson’s death on Tuesday at the age of 84 came after years of illnesses, including a rare neurological disorder. Even in his later years, however, he stayed in the game — to continue his football metaphor — making an appearance onstage to thunderous applause during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 2024.
Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong interviews Jesse Jackson during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 2018.
News he had died hit me as hard as if I’d lost a dear relative. I didn’t know Jackson personally, but had the privilege of interviewing him multiple times during my career.
In fact, the first time I met him was asa student journalist on the campus of Howard University. The last time I’d actually gotten a chance to interview him was in 2018 during the 50th anniversary commemoration of King’s assassination in Memphis outside what had been the Lorraine Motel, which is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum. I wish I’d kept the recording of what he said.
As I processed the news of his death, I made a point of posting on Abby Phillip’s Instagram page a brief note ofthanks for her work chronicling Jackson’s life and legacy in her book, A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. Phillip told me last year that she knew she was working against time and Jackson’s frail health to finish the project before his death.
Her goal, she said, “was to make sure that this chapter didn’t get lost to history.”
I was a kid in the 1970s during the Black Power era who repeated his chants, “I am somebody!”
Back then, it was affirming to see Jackson on TV with his then-signature Afro, or later delivering electrifying speeches during his groundbreaking runs for the presidency. We used to chant, “Run Jesse Run!”
One of the first articles I wrote for my student newspaper was about Jackson’s Operation PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity.
Jacksonspent his adult life at the forefront of the pursuit of equality for African Americans, and for that, we should always be grateful.
To me, losing this great leader in February during Black History Month — at a time when our people’s contributions to the nation’s history are being threatened with erasure — only magnifies the sense of loss. It should also remind those of us who care about civil and human rights that it’s our turn to take up the struggle — and keep fighting.
I was cranking out the newsletter in Tuesday’s predawn darkness when we learned that the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who’d been our greatest living bridge to the civil rights heroics of the 1960s and ‘70s, had died at age 84. Covering his groundbreaking 1984 campaign as a cub reporter at the Birmingham News is still a career highlight four-decades-plus later — a memory that was reinforced recently listening to Abby Phillip’s excellent new book on Jackson. He leaves us right when his victories for African Americans in arenas such as corporate hiring and college admissions are under attack, and it challenges us to fight to preserve them. RIP to an American original.
How ICE protest by ‘an average Joe’ from Haddon Heights went viral
“I never want to see a child run away from our own government again,” said this self-described first-time protester, Joseph Zobel from Haddon Heights, at a rally in Lindenwold, N.J., the day after children ran from a school bus stop after ICE appeared to conduct an operation in the area.
Last Friday, “an average Joe who grew up in Haddon Heights” named Joseph Zobel was at work when he saw a viral video from the nearby South Jersey town of Lindenwold that shocked the nation, and shocked him.
The clip from a Ring doorbell camera showed a gaggle of fourth and fifth graders running in a panic, screaming, “ICE! ICE!” as masked federal immigration agents had approached their morning bus stop the day before.
“I just thought, ‘How can that be happening here in the United States?’” Zobel told me Monday in his first media interview, conducted by email. When he got home from work, he saw online that the group Cooper River Indivisible was holding an “ICE Out” protest at the Lindenwold municipal building at 4 p.m.
He looked at the clock. It was 3:58.
“Something inside of me said, ‘Go up there and stand with these people,’” said Zobel, a 36-year-old school coach who said he’s never been to a protest before in his life. “I wanted to stand for what is right.” As he dashed out, Zobel also grabbed one thing — the American flag he flies in front of his house most of the time (except during football season, when an Eagles flag replaces it).
As many as 300 people were at the protest, as Indivisible organizer Amber Clemments asked the flag-bearing Zobel if he’d be willing to film a video. Zobel’s raw emotion, choking back tears as he said, “I watched fourth- and fifth-grade kids run away from our own government,” soon ignited across social media over the long Presidents Day weekend.
By Tuesday morning, the 47-second clip of Zobel had been watched an astronomical 2.9 million times on TikTok — and liked by some 709,000 viewers — even as it also went viral on Bluesky, X, Threads, and other social media platforms.
It’s not hard to understand why. Zobel, who described himself as a patriotic regular voter but never very political, instantly became the bearded, baseball hat-wearing, anguished face of a new American majority — an Everyman shocked into action by the horror of immigration raids, wondering how best to protect his neighbors.
The two South Jersey viral videos — the one depicting the raid itself and Zobel’s raw reaction — revealed how both the terrorizing tactics of masked immigration cops and the powerful reaction from often nonpolitical Americans, dubbed “neighborism,” are spreading far beyond the Minnesota tundra where this battle was initially met.
Indeed, local activists say Lindenwold — last stop on the heavily traveled PATCO line, just over 15 miles southeast of Philadelphia — has been under a relentless siege from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents since last spring, not long after Donald Trump became president. The transit hub has become a magnet for immigrants in recent years, with a local school population that is just under 60% Latino.
Craig Strimel, a leader of Cooper River Indivisible, a local chapter of the group that organized the large “No Kings” protests, said activists first learned of the ICE activity when a Lindenwold immigrant couple escaped agents last year by taking refuge in the local high school, where the principal blocked the feds at the doorway. Since then, Strimel said, ICE watchers have seen frequent activity in and around a cluster of five apartment complexes with large immigrant populations, but few known arrests.
“It was becoming apparent early on that this was all about creating terror,” said Strimel of the frequent ICE sightings. Some local residents stopped leaving their apartments, he said, and a once-popular restaurant in Lindenwold just closed its doors amid rumors that the couple that owned it has returned to Mexico.
All of this set the stage for last Thursday, when masked federal agents wearing tactical gear arrived early in the morning at Lindenwold’s Woodland Village Apartments just as 44 elementary school kids were waiting for their school bus. The sighting triggered a panic that saw some kids running away and others frantically hustling onto the bus as the driver arrived. No one was apprehended or reported hurt.
On Monday, U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said the agents went to the complex hoping to arrest a Honduran immigrant who’d once been convicted of aggravated assault. The man was not taken on Thursday and remains free.
Although some outlets reported the large protest was in response to the high-profile raid — which has been covered by the CBS Evening News, MS Now’sMorning Joe, and elsewhere — that took place just a day and a half earlier, the rally actually had been in the works for several weeks.
It had been organized by a young woman from Lindenwold named Tatiana — a 20-year-old business major at Camden County Community College who spoke with me Monday on the condition that I not use her full name — who’d been seeing the ICE activity in her hometown and felt it was time local people spoke out.
Tatiana told me that the idea behind the Lindenwold protest was “to give the community a voice — to be able to say, ‘No, we don’t stand for this.’ That’s the most important thing for me. It’s just bringing community together and deciding we’re not OK with this at all.” But she agreed the bus stop raid had given the event a boost from residents believing “that children should not be scared of federal law enforcement.”
Zobel was one of those neighbors. In the email interview, he described himself as “just your average Joe who grew up in Haddon Heights.” He did volunteer that he’s voted in every election since he turned 18, and that his first ballot was cast for Barack Obama, “and I felt proud walking out of the booth that day.”
Fittingly, Zobel sounded somewhat Obama-esque when he described his dismay over America’s bitter partisan divide. “We as a nation are so angry with one another, and that makes me so sad,” he said. Not surprisingly, he’s as stunned as anyone at the millions of views for Friday’s video, and somewhat concerned about the impact, saying, “I just hope this video does not divide people.”
But Zobel’s words and teary-eyed emotion went viral because it was such a shot of hope — that in a moment when hate is on public display in the streets of the United States, “your average Joe” who’d once stood on the sidelines is now grabbing the American flag and taking the field to fight for their neighbors. An authoritarian movement dependent on rage simply never counted on the brotherly love that sent this nonpolitical Eagles fan to his first protest.
It might not be his last. “I am always happy,” he said, “to help support humanity.”
Yo, do this!
With several inches of snow still on the ground, it might shock you to hear this, but American soccer is back! The Philadelphia Union — despite winning the 2025 Supporters Shield and boasting Major League Soccer’s best winning percentage in the 2020s — radically shook things up during the offseason. With new strikers Ezekiel Alladoh and Agustín Anello looking to amp up their attack, the Union’s quest for the CONCACAF Champions Cup begins Wednesday in Trinidad against Defence Force FC at 6 p.m. on FS2. Saturday night at 7:30 p.m., it’s back to the chillier climes of Washington for the MLS opener against DC United on Apple TV (with no need in 2026 for an additional Season Pass subscription, as in past years).
In the quest for what’s new in American popular culture, sometimes we take for granted the established jewels in our midst. I’ve long felt that MS Now’s 9 p.m. (now just on Monday nights) host Rachel Maddow is our best TV commentator because of the way she weaves the historical past into the headlines of America’s tortured present. But since last summer, she has upped her game. Maddow’s coverage of two stories underreported in most of the mainstream media — grassroots resistance to the Trump regime, and now the push for a nationwide network of warehouse concentration camps — has created appointment television every Monday.
Ask me anything
Question: What is your take on the latest CBS censoring of [Stephen] Colbert? — @bcooper82.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: Another Tuesday morning breaking story on deadline: The CBS overseers of Late Night with Stephen Colbert — the top-rated talk show that’s nevertheless ending this year in what critics see as genuflecting to the Trump regime that the program frequently mocks — would not air a recorded interview with Texas state lawmaker and Democratic Senate primary candidate James Talarico. The backstory here is that the Federal Communications Commission has long exempted late-night talk shows from its equal time rule about political candidates on licensed broadcast outlets, but last month, FCC chair Brendan Carr — a pro-Trump MAGA pit bull — said this is changing. That apparently was enough for CBS’s new Trump-friendly management, which would not broadcast the interview (available on YouTube, now certain to get more views than if it hadn’t been censored). This new flap just highlights what a perilous moment this is for the First Amendment and American democracy writ large. Government limits on what viewpoints you can see or hear are a sign of dictatorship, full stop.
What you’re saying about …
Last week’s question about a winning Democratic strategy for the 2026 midterms drew a robust response, and almost all of the replies were thoughtful and nuanced. If there was a consensus, it was that Democrats should tailor their candidates to the divergent views of the congressional districts they hope to win. As Naomi Miller stated, “I think progressive candidates should run in progressive districts, and mainstream democrats in mainstream, purple, and red districts.” Still, a number of you think America’s bad experience with MAGA extremism means a sharp left turn is warranted in response. “I’d like for the Democrats to become more progressive and combative toward Trump than they already are,” wrote Benjamin Spohn, voicing an opinion many share these days.
📮 This week’s question: Tuesday’s passing of the Rev. Jesse Jackson is one more reminder that many icons of America’s tumultuous 20th century are disappearing. So who do you think is the current greatest living American, and why? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “greatest living American” in the subject line.
Backstory on the main reason the media is not trusted
Exterior images of CNN headquarters in Atlanta and the New York Times Building in Manhattan.
It’s rare these days to write something that everyone can agree on, but here goes: Public trust in the media has never been lower than it is today. How low? A Gallup poll last fall found that public trust in the ability of newspapers, TV, and radio to fairly and accurately report the news had plunged to 28%, the lowest ever recorded. Why? It’s complicated. The people’s faith in every major institution has declined in the 21st century, after all. And it’s clear that in a deeply divided America, rage against the media machine looks different from the left than it does from the right.
This weekend, in a New York Times piece largely about the broken promises of one media-mogul billionaire — Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — columnist Lydia Polgreen put forth an explanation for sinking media trust that jibes with a lot of what I’ve witnessed since graduating into full-time journalism back in 1981. I believe it’s not the only reason — but the biggest, and maybe the most misunderstood.
Polgreen noted that the common theory for the public turning against Big Media — that journalists grew more partisan and biased after the tumult of the 1960s and ‘70s — doesn’t comport with the bigger reality. The era that peaked with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal launched a decades-long golden era of profitable news organizations spending big on investigative and accountability journalism — exactly what viewers and readers claimed they wanted.
Yet, trust declined as that happened. Polgreen cited a study in the late 1990s that compared then-contemporary media to 1960s newspapers and found the earlier times were “naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging.” Polgreen wrote that moving “away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation … led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw.”
I think this explanation is spot on, but before readers jump all over me, let me quickly add a couple of caveats. Starting way back in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, there was also a response to the growing backlash — especially in elite, Beltway journalism — that resulted in too much groveling to authority, and thus stenography around government lies like the 2003 Iraq War. This has only gotten worse with the current wave of billionaire owners like the Post’s Bezos. This means many liberals now also distrust the media, but not for the same reasons as conservatives, who’ve long loathed journalism for probing America’s inequities around race or gender.
The explanation offered by Polgreen jumped out at me because it fit with what I explored in my 2022 book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, which looked at Americans losing trust in another large institution: colleges and universities. The liberal ideas that were nurtured on campuses in the postwar college enrollment boom — including the civil rights movement — triggered the same grievance-filled, largely white working-class backlash as did journalism about social injustice. Today, the only road back for the media is to hold the powerful to account — and understand that not everyone is going to like it.
What I wrote on this date in 2022
People can’t say they didn’t see America’s current crisis coming. On this date four years ago, I expressed my shock and amazement that little more than one year beyond Donald Trump’s attempted coup to stay in power, the right-wing’s creation of a political fantasy world was spiraling out of control, with lies about Hillary Clinton spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign and Joe Biden giving out free crack pipes (?!!). I wrote, “[Historian Ruth] Ben-Ghiat told me that the failure of the Jan. 6 insurrection only forced the GOP to double-down on embracing alternate realities, because ‘they have to reckon with the fact that [Trump] lost, that he’s no longer the leader.’”
There’s been no rest on themass deportation beat. In my Sunday column, I looked at the out-of-control lying from the Trump regime, with unbelievable fictions about everything from shootings and rampant brutality by masked immigration officers to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s whoppers about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. I argued that government lying is fundamentally unconstitutional and that the perpetrators need to be punished, including prison time. Over the weekend, I wrote about how, while Minneapolis was a victory for the forces resisting American authoritarianism, that won’t stop Homeland Security from putting thousands of new officers on the street and expanding its concentration camps. The fight for the soul of the nation has only just begun.
What was I saying higher up in this newsletter about accountability journalism? Ever since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society push in the mid-1960s, community nonprofits have been a valuable source of urban renewal, yet aresometimes dragged down by waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s a problem that sadly persists, as shown last week by a major Inquirer investigation into Philadelphia’s NOMO Foundation, one of the best-funded nonprofits attacking youth violence and crime. Ace reporters Ryan W. Briggs and Samantha Melamed found that the foundation has received more than $6 million in public funds in recent years, but faced an IRS lien and eviction lawsuits while it was forced to close its housing program. This is why we have a First Amendment, so that a free press can report on the problems a corrupt or inept government refuses to deal with. Subscribing to The Inquirer gives you access to this type of essential journalism, and you’ll also feel good about supporting this vital work.
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For one day at least, Donald Trump’s bigoted effort to whitewash history was foiled in Philadelphia.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the slavery exhibits that were removed last month from the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park.
Fittingly, the legal rebuke came during Black History Month as Trump tries to rewrite America’s history of slavery, undermine voting rights, and rollback civil rights efforts designed to live up to the Founding Fathers’ vision of a country where all are created equal.
Even better, the ruling came on Presidents Day, a federal holiday first set aside to honor George Washington, who voluntarily gave up power, unlike Trump, who was criminally indicted for trying to overturn an election he lost.
In a poetic touch that feels conjured by Octavius V. Catto or William Still, the Trump administration lost in federal court on a lawsuit brought by the City of Philadelphia, which is headed by its first African American female mayor.
The President’s House exhibit was created to recognize the enslaved people who lived in Washington’s home in Philadelphia while he was president. Like the nearby Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the President’s House is an essential part of American history.
Trump wants to airbrush the parts of American history that do not fit with his racist record and white supremacist messaging. But understanding how slavery shaped the economic, social, and political forces across the United States is crucial to addressing the systemic racism and inequality that persists today.
Glenn Bergman (right) and Dianne Manning try to prevent a “counterprotester” from removing notes posted by visitors on the walls where the National Park Service removed panels about slavery at the President’s House site on Monday. The woman began ripping down the mostly handwritten signs while the group Avenging the Ancestors Coalition was gathered for an annual Presidents Day observance on the other side of the wall.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe called out Trump’s cruel attempt to take the country backward in unsparing terms. She began her 40-page opinion by quoting directly from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime:
“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”
She compared the Trump administration’s claim that it can unilaterally remove exhibits it does not like to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”
Rufe, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President George W. Bush, did not buy the Trump administration’s authoritarian argument. “[T]he government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”
She added: “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
Attorney Michael Coard, leader of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, speaks at the President’s House site Monday, during the group’s annual gathering for a Presidents Day observance.
Rufe dismissed those claims and ordered the federal government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026,” the day before the exhibits were removed.
Initially, Rufe did not set a deadline to restore the displays. But she updated her order, requiring the exhibits to be restored by 5 p.m. Friday.
The Trump administration will likely do everything it can to drag out a resolution.
There is no time to waste in ending this racist charade.
The country is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is a national embarrassment that the President’s House exhibits are missing while the city expects 1.5 million visitors this year.
Philadelphia is the birthplace of America. It is here that the founders declared their independence from King George III. Their list of grievances against the king echoes some of Trump’s abuses.
Judge Rufe’s order struck a blow for telling the truth, something Washington would appreciate.
“It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” Rufe wrote. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.”
Somewhere, the enslaved who labored at the President’s House smiled.
Say their names: Ona Judge, Hercules Posey, Moll, Giles, Austin, Richmond, Paris, Joe Richardson, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee.
If Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and City Council needed more convincing about why Philadelphia should no longer elect a register of wills, they now have $900,000 worth of reasons.
That is the amount taxpayers have shelled out in recent years to settle lawsuits by former employees who refused to play the shopworn patronage game.
This appalling waste would not happen if the city stopped electing a register of wills.
There is no logical reason for this to be an elected position. It is a back-office function that issues marriage licenses, probates wills, and maintains records of residents who got married and died.
In most world-class cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, a clerk or court office handles these mundane tasks. But in Philadelphia, the register of wills stands as a relic from the city’s corrupt and contented era of machine politics.
The sooner the elected post goes away, the sooner Philadelphia can move into the modern era. The problem is that no elected official in a one-party town has the courage to do what is right by taxpayers and push to eliminate the so-called row offices, which include the register of wills and the sheriff, another elected post with a long history of corruption and inefficiency.
Former Mayor Michael Nutter, who served from 2008 to 2016, was one of the few elected leaders in recent times who supported eliminating the row offices. He was successful in folding the obscure Clerk of Quarter Sessions office into the Philadelphia court system, but City Council refused to eliminate the other two row offices.
In the past decade, there has been scant talk about reforming city government or increasing efficiency — even as Philadelphia’s budget ballooned by roughly 75%.
The register of wills stands as Philly’s patronage poster child.
For four decades, the office was run by Ron Donatucci and was staffed with ward leaders, committee members, friends, and family members connected to different power players in the Democratic Party.
Tracey Gordon, former register of wills for the city of Philadelphia.
In 2019, Donatucci was defeated by Tracey Gordon, who previously ran for City Council, city commissioner, and state representative. Things didn’t exactly improve.
Gordon lasted only one term, but left taxpayers with a trail of lawsuits by former employees who said they were pressured to donate to her campaign.
Last week, the city agreed to pay $250,000 to a former clerk who said he was fired for refusing to contribute $150 to Gordon’s campaign. Several other former employees received six-figure payments after filing similar complaints.
Gordon was defeated in the 2023 Democratic primary by John Sabatina Sr., a ward leader from the Northeast. He began swapping out old patronage hires for new ones, which led to more lawsuits.
The city has paid out $256,000 in settlements to nine former register of wills employees who filed lawsuits alleging Sabatina fired them.
Five cases are still pending, which means taxpayers will keep paying.
This Editorial Board has long called for the elimination of the register of wills and the sheriff’s office, moves that would save the city tax dollars and unending embarrassment.
The Committee of Seventy and the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Agency both issued reports in 2009 calling for the elimination of row offices. (The title of one was “Needless Jobs.” The title of the other was “A history we can no longer afford: Consolidating Philadelphia’s Row Offices.”)
But until voters demand change, the inefficient patronage system will grind on.
Philadelphia has always understood that music is never just music; sometimes rhythm becomes resistance. In this city, songs have spilled out of union halls and church basements, echoed off rowhouse walls, and marched alongside movements for labor rights and racial justice.
That tradition shows why Bruce Springsteen’s music, and his choices, still matter, decades after a summer night in East Berlin when rock and roll quietly challenged both sides of a superpower rivalry.
In 1988, nearly 300,000 young East Germans gathered for the largest rock concert in the history of the German Democratic Republic. The performer was Springsteen, a working-class songwriter whose music had already been widely misunderstood in the United States.
Ronald Reagan appropriated the pounding chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic anthem while ignoring its verses — the story of a Vietnam veteran sent off “to go and kill the yellow man,” only to return home abandoned by the country he served.
In East Germany, those lyrics landed differently. Listeners heard the betrayal beneath the beat. They recognized themselves in the song’s moral tension. That understanding is why, unlike most Western rock stars, Springsteen was invited to play behind the Iron Curtain.
Pressure to stop the concert came from both sides of the Cold War. The U.S. Embassy urged Springsteen to cancel, fearing the show would legitimize a communist regime. At the same time, the East German youth organization sponsoring the concert — without Springsteen’s knowledge — advertised it as a “solidarity concert” for Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Springsteen refused both. He told U.S. officials he would not cancel. He told East German organizers he would not perform unless Sandinista banners were removed. His music, he insisted, belonged to ordinary working people, not to politicians.
About an hour into the concert, Springsteen stopped and addressed the crowd in halting German. “It’s great to be in East Berlin,” he said. “I’m not here for or against any government. I came to play rock and roll for East Berliners in the hope that, one day, all barriers will be torn down.”
He had wanted to say “walls,” but anxious officials begged him to soften the language. So he let the music finish the thought, launching into Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” a song written for the refugees, the silenced, the imprisoned, which Springsteen has lately reprised. A year later, the Berlin Wall fell. Many described the night as a widening crack — a moment when imagination briefly outran fear.
People protest against ICE outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Jan. 30 in Minneapolis.
This pattern is familiar. Springsteen’s work has long been embraced by audiences while misread, or deliberately misunderstood, by power. His songs are moral arguments set to melody, like the Academy Award-winning tune “Streets of Philadelphia.” They insist the American dream is fragile. It collapses when dignity, accountability, and justice are denied.
His message to them has never changed. Freedom does not come from walls. Power does not come from cruelty. The streets belong to everyone, or they belong to no one. Will this be the moment when they hear Donald Trump’s administration is destroying whatever is left of the American dream?
Music alone does not tear down barriers — or walls. But it shapes what people are willing to imagine, what they are willing to demand, and who they are willing to stand beside.
Springsteen’s music calls us to rise up against injustice, whether in the streets of Philadelphia, Berlin, or Minneapolis.
Kristen Ghodsee is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of 12 books and is currently on academic sabbatical as an honorary fellow of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Susan Neiman has been the director of the Einstein Forum since 2000. She is a philosopher, essayist, and the author of 10 books.
The Thursday print edition of The Inquirer provided several reasons why we should applaud the current presidential administration for its contributions to criminal justice reform. For example, unlike many liberal state and local politicians who have talked the talk about providing employment opportunities for former criminals, Associated Press writer Ryan J. Foley reported that enlightened managers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have hired these individuals while they were still exhibiting criminal behavior. It should be mentioned that ICE has found creative ways for these individuals to sublimate their violent temperaments and offensive libidos into constructive law enforcement activities that have made cities like New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago so much safer.
In that same edition of The Inquirer, Washington Post reporters described how the U.S. Department of Justice has successfully kept the names of sexual predators in the Jeffrey Epstein files out of the public eye. In an era in which progressives have rallied to “ban the box” that would otherwise require job applicants to describe their criminal history, the Justice Department has gone one step further in assuring Epstein criminals will not be economically penalized.
It is refreshing to see that just like Lady Justice, the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Justice have undertaken their duties as if they were blindfolded.
In 1973, White House counsel John Dean famously warned President Richard Nixon that the Watergate cover-up was a “cancer within — close to the presidency.” He cautioned that this corruption would consume Nixon’s presidency if allowed to fester. History proved him right, as Nixon resigned in disgrace.
Today, that warning rings with renewed urgency. By appointing Kurt Olsen as director of election security and Heather Honey as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity — both known election deniers — Trump has institutionalized systemic subversion. With his intent to nationalize elections on the heels of these appointments, the administration is poised to seize state-run processes, despite having no constitutional authority to do so.
Had it not been for the stabilizing counsel from the president’s first-term advisers, who have since been replaced with yes-men and ideologues, the republic may not have survived. With these guardians of democracy gone, the American Experiment is in grave jeopardy.
Donald Trump’s administration spends a fortune of our tax dollars to create concentration camps across the country. The cruelty is mind-boggling.
Meanwhile, we have a housing crisis throughout the nation. Imagine if those funds were diverted from tormenting our immigrant neighbors and devoted to providing affordable housing for our communities.
Judith Silver,Philadelphia
. . .
ICE is going to spend over $38 billion on detention centers. This country has so many needs — medical costs skyrocketing, a housing shortage, people mired in poverty, disaster relief, drunk drivers who kill 10,000 people per year (far more than ever have been killed by foreign nationals in the last half century), and the list goes on and on — and yet, the Trump administration believes this is a good use of our tax dollars. This surge to “mass deportation” is just another solution in search of a problem.
Steven Morley,Philadelphia
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