Good morning. It is June 9th. It is a very chilly and even more soggy morning in New York City. The morning newspaper never showed up at all on the stoop, but nevertheless, this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Absent a paper copy of the New York Times to look at this morning, the PDF online of the front page shows that the paper shook up the layout and its pre-slotted weekend programming to deliver a four-column headline. “TRUMP DEPLOYS NATIONAL GUARD TO L.A.,” over a four-column photo shot from above showing ranks of military vehicles with a line of troops in front of them facing off against ranks and ranks of protesters.

Below the photo, these subheads are “TEAR GAS AT PROTESTS / Rare Use of Federal Force After Days of Clashes Over ICE Raids,” And there's four bylines. Dateline Los Angeles. “Tensions boiled over in Los Angeles on Sunday for a third day.” Three days into it, the emptied-out news writing metaphor of tensions boiling over doesn't make very much sense. By now, you'd either have a fire on the stove or the burner would long since have been doused and the house would have filled up with gas. Nevertheless, the tensions boiled over for a third day. “Hours after president Trump took the extraordinary action of ordering at least 2000 national guard members to assist immigration agents clashing with demonstrators.” There's another little hollow formula “clashing with,” what does it mean? Next paragraph, “near downtown, federal law enforcement officials fired canisters of tear gas at a group protesting immigration raids. Department of Homeland Security officers were among those who fired less than lethal rounds outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, where a crowd had been growing since the morning. The officers included at least one member of ICE's special response team, which wears military fatigues.” What “clashing with” denotes then, is gassing and shooting at. Less than lethal, meanwhile, is an upgrade from the old use of non-lethal, but still doesn't quite capture the fact that these munitions are explicitly not supposed to be used for crowd control, but for subduing dangerous individual suspects without shooting them dead with bullets. I was going to say something about officers firing these things indiscriminately into crowds, but that's not really accurate. There is, for example, extremely clear video available online of an officer quite deliberately aiming a gun and shooting an Australian television reporter in the middle of a live segment. I can't tell if the Time story makes any mention of that or not, because somehow the story that ran on the Times' front page is not listed in the front page index online and appears to have been somehow devoured by or reapportioned among the Times has live blog coverage. But the readable portion on the virtual page one, before it jumps into oblivion, goes on to say, “the announcement late Saturday by Mr. Trump, who said that any protest or act of violence that impeded officials would be considered a form of rebellion.” 

“Protest” or “act of violence” is certainly an elastic range of activities. “Was,” the story continues, “an escalation that put Los Angeles and California squarely at the center of his administration's immigration crackdown.” The state's governor, the Times writes, “Gavin Newsom, called the rare use of federal powers to bypass his authority, ‘purposefully inflammatory’ on Saturday night, adding that there was no unmet need and that the deployment was the ‘wrong mission and will erode public trust.’ On Sunday,” the Times continues, “Mr. Newsom asked Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, in a formal letter to rescind Mr. Trump's order to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles. ‘We didn't have a problem until Trump got involved,’ Mr. Newsom said in a social media post. ‘This is a serious breach of state sovereignty, inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they're actually needed.’ Continued on page A14, wherever that may be. 

In breaking news that wouldn't have been in the paper, even if there was a paper, Israeli forces boarded the protest ship carrying Greta Thunberg and others with aid meant for Gaza in international waters, seized the ship, detained the people, and put out some snotty statements about how it was all a publicity stunt. Okay, and what was it publicizing exactly? And how does grabbing the ship undermine that message? 

Back in the print New York Times, or the virtual approximation thereof, the top two columns on the left are occupied by a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Peter “Trump’s Threat to Musk: More ‘Abuse of Power’ / President Views Government as His Tool,” Fascinating deployment of the quotation marks there in the headline. Naturally, Donald Trump did not say “I am going to retaliate against Elon Musk with abuse of power,” So, who did? After the story recounts how Donald Trump in the midst of his fight with Elon Musk online, threatened to terminate Musk's government contracts, the fourth paragraph brings in an expert. “‘The Musk quote is just further proof that Trump and the late King Louis share a common view of the world. The state, it is me,’ said Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. ‘And yes, this is an example of Trump publicly and improperly threatening to use the enormous contracting power of the federal government as a weapon to punish someone for criticizing him. It is a complete abuse of power.’” With all due respect to Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, he doesn't really seem like someone whose utterances rate as front page news. No one is stopping the presses to crash a story into the paper because Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission uttered some news breaking remarks. Peter Baker has correctly identified an abuse of presidential power as an abuse of presidential power. But the conventions of journalistic objectivity, as practiced by the Times, obligate him to go find someone else to say such a thing.

The New York Times would not allow itself to write a news headline asserting that the president is abusing his power, but it's perfectly happy to go fishing for a quote that will say that. In this case, the fishing line is still visible, as what Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission says, specifically is, “and yes, this is an example of Trump publicly and improperly threatening,” etc. which points back to his having been asked by the reporter to affirm the proposition that Trump is abusing his power. So he got the quote, the quote goes in quotation marks, and the Times simply reports it, as a thing in the world that someone factually spoke. 

Below that, the headline is “Musk May Be Gone After a Spat, But His Team Burrows In Deeper.” One, two, three, four, five bylines on that one. “Elon Musk's blowup with President Trump,” the Times writes, “may have doomed Washington's most potent partnership, but the billionaire's signature cost cutting project has become deeply embedded in Mr. Trump's administration and could be there to stay.” Need a fact check “on cost cutting.” Nevertheless, “at the Department of Energy, for example, a former member of the Department of Government Efficiency is now serving as the Chief of Staff. At the Interior Department, DOJ members have been converted into federal employees and embedded into the agency, said a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, where a spokeswoman said that there are two senior officials associated with the DOJ mission, work continues at pace on efforts to dismantle an agency that Mr. Trump has long targeted.”

Next to that, the story is “Conspiracy Theories Haunting Trump Officials / Supporters Fume Over a Failure to Prove Fringe Claims.” Looking at the case of Dan Bongino, the extremist conspiracist podcaster turned deputy FBI director and how he ended up having to go on TV and tell the audience that he had assiduously cultivated and been captured by, that the FBI file on Jeffrey Epstein says that he killed himself. “A Trump allied podcaster,” the Times writes, “suggested the FBI leaders were beholden to some unseen powers. A former FBI agent who has been critical of the bureau posted a parody of a law firm ad with Mr. Bongino standing next to a sign that read, ‘Trust Me & Bro Consulting.’ Tucker Carlson, a friend of Mr. Bongino's, said Trump appointees were ‘making a huge mistake, promising to reveal things and then not revealing them.’ Alex Jones, a founding father of the modern conspiracy movement, referred to FBI Director Cash Patel's own handling of the Epstein case as flat-out ‘gaslighting.’ As with the LA protests, the underlying theme here is that it's hard to organize a political movement around telling people a bunch of made-up stories to get them agitated and then win power and become responsible for dealing with facts in the world. When there aren't millions of undocumented immigrant criminals roaming the streets You try to make your deportation numbers by busting up an elementary school graduation or grabbing day laborers off the Home Depot parking lot and people see that's what you're doing and they don't like it. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joan MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.