Good morning. It is December 11th, it is a rainy, unpleasantly warm morning in New York City, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Last night, a judge scuttled the sale of InfoWars to The Onion. Live posting about the proceeding on Bluesky, Anna Merlin reported, Judge Christopher Lopez denies the motion approving the sale of Infowars' assets to Global Tetrahedron, says the auction process was doomed the moment it was sealed, lacked transparency, had a lack of clarity about what was even purchased, and money was left on the table. No one else comes away owning Infowars either. Now they have to figure out a new way to untangle the whole mess. 

The lead spot on the front of this morning's New York Times belongs to Luigi Mangione, the accused CEO killer. “Suspect in CEOs killing veered off privileged path. Ivy leaguer raised by a prominent family grew isolated and lived with pain.” “Ivy leaguer raised by a prominent family” sort of makes it sound like “Ivy leaguer” is some inborn characteristic, rather than a status that a person acquires after most of the raising is done. The story is  the story everyone has, an apparently cheerful popular successful life a painful back condition that seems to have been an obstacle to sex. Lumbar surgery, and then six months of silence, followed by the shooting. The Times describes the brief handwritten statement he was allegedly carrying as a screed, which is a pretty overheated characterization. The Times is one of the many media outlets not publishing the text in full. Short, though it is. But whatever sense of propriety guided that decision didn't stop the paper from giving a chunk of the statement, the last word in the article. “The 262 word handwritten document,” the Times writes, “notes that as UnitedHealthcare's market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not. “'To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,' the writer wrote, according to law enforcement officials. The note condemned companies that 'continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.'” 

Next to that, on page one, under a four-column photograph of Syrians searching a morgue for their relatives who had been imprisoned under Assad, The Times has an investigation. 

“Realtors Nonprofit Funds Conservative Groups.” The story is that the National Association of Realtors, which The Times identifies as the largest trade organization in the United States, officially makes a point of splitting its political contributions evenly between Democrats and Republicans. “Political neutrality,” the Times writes, “is the backbone of the NAR brand. But the group also operates a spinoff pass-through organization called the American Property Owners Alliance, which distributes the majority of its money to Republicans, mostly in support of issues like abortion restrictions and fighting DEI, which have no connection to housing policy.” The Times writes, “The pattern of giving, three nonprofit lawyers said, appears politically motivated and out of step with the American Property Owners' Alliance's stated mission as a nonpartisan nonprofit and an advocate for the rights of all property owners. It's the kind of giving that could put its tax exempt status under the scrutiny of the Internal Revenue Service, the lawyers said.” The word “could” there might be trying to do more than it can reasonably be expected to do. The chances of Donald Trump's IRS reigning in the real estate industry's explicit embrace of its always implicit reactionary potential are less than zero. They're outright negative if there's any way to steer some extra tax credits to the partisan organization. 

Next to that, “Israel decimates Syria's defenses, seizing chaotic moment to strike an arsenal.” While the Syrians were pouring into the streets and emptying out the prisons in jubilation about the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the Israeli military, the Times reports, was launching at least 350 airstrikes that “leveled military assets across Syria, taking out the Navy, fighter jets, drones, tanks, air defense systems, weapons plants, and a wide array of missiles and rockets. Israeli officials,” the Times writes, “said they were destroying weapons and military facilities to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists.” Having them in the hands of a mass murdering tyrant was just fine, apparently, which would make sense reciprocity-wise.

Below the fold, “Democrats see room to yield on the border.” There's been more than a decade of this and the Democrats still think they can somehow finesse a compromise position with the anti-immigrant demagogues whose entire political strategy is built around never compromising on immigration. The Times talked to a bunch of democratic governors or governors-to-be and reports that the governor's responses amount to a tacit acknowledgement that Mr. Trump's election signaled a desire among voters for tougher positions on immigration. “Some Democratic governors,” the Times writes, “suggested that his second administration would be more experienced than his first and was likely to be savvier about how to achieve his policy goals.” How exactly they square that with the arena full of people at the Republican National Convention waving professionally produced MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs, The Times does not say. The piece continues, “Still, the governors warned that Mr. Trump's broad plans on immigration were dangerous, and they argued that his victory did not mean that voters now rejected humanitarian concerns. They promised to push back on requests to use state detention centers or the National Guard, setting up potential conflicts with the Trump administration.” There's absolutely no political or discursive mechanism to thread whatever gap you think exists between endorsing a desire among voters for tougher positions on immigration and denying that voters now rejected humanitarian concerns. 

Kamala Harris ran on improving the capacity of the asylum system and otherwise trying to defuse the idea that there's a border crisis through better administration and logistics. Getting tough doesn't mean running the border more rationally. It means being more inhumane at the border. And even when Democrats do that, the abundant evidence says Republicans will keep on attacking them.

Xenophobia isn't a policy position. It's a kind of political theater. No matter how much you try to clap along with the audience They're never gonna let you take a bow.

Next to that is an obituary of Nikki Giovanni, which jumps to take the entire back page It includes the quote from her work Nikki Rosa, “and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me.” Nevertheless, it looks like she did sit down with the Times for one of their obituary interviews. “There's nothing as wonderful,” she says at the end, “as knowing you have done your job.”

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Our podcasting efforts are sustained by you, the listeners, through your subscription dollars and tip donations. Please do keep those coming. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.