Good morning. It is December 12th. The soggy heat has blown away, leaving a bright, appropriately cold 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. 

And there is really too much news to even talk about as this overstuffed week groans along. The lead story on the front of the New York Times, one column wide, is “Trump breathed life into choice at Defense Department. Seen as test of power, prospects of Hegseth are salvaged even amid personal scandals.” Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman report out the timeline of how, with one hideously disqualifying story after another breaking about Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, after toying with the idea of replacing him with Ron DeSantis, instead embraced forcing Hegseth through as what the Times describes as “a test case of power and intimidation.” It was, the story says, “a reminder of Mr. Trump's ability to summon an online swarm, even while spending minimal personal capital of his own. It showed that he has at his disposal a powerful movement which jumped into action once his desires became clear. And it highlighted the role of Elon Musk, who has bottomless wealth to enforce Mr. Trump's desires.” The Times describes the pressure campaign against Senator Joni Ernst. Maga figures like Charlie Kirk, the Times' writes, “quickly turned their audiences against the Republican senators believed to be the biggest obstacles. They threatened to recruit a primary challenger against Ms. Ernst in 2026. They sent threatening posts on social media and on their radio shows, they urged listeners to pressure Ms. Ernst and to call her congressional office. Some online users scraped up information ostensibly from her divorce and made it public.” And the story continues, “a dark money conservative group that Mr. Musk has used for political spending ran digital ads in Iowa calling on people to urge Ms. Ernst to vote for Mr. Hegseth.” 

Having a person with effectively unlimited financial resources on standby to support a challenger to anyone who defies the president is a pretty dangerous state of affairs to have, and it really, really works. As with Mitch McConnell inventing a procedural reason not to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial for what Mitch McConnell had publicly acknowledged was a dangerous and insupportable act of violence, the people who are now having their principles broken by the MAGA machinery have settled on complaining that the sexual assault accusation against Hegseth, which is covered by a non-disclosure agreement that accompanied Hegseth paying a settlement to his accuser, is anonymous. “Last week, the Times writes, the allegations against Mr. Hegseth were very disturbing, in the words of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Yet, soon after that declaration, Mr. Graham said that anonymous statements against Mr. Hegseth were invalid.” The Times continues, “Ms. Ernst's turnaround was even more striking. Mr. Hegseth had seemed almost tailor-made to earn her opposition. She is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. He has said women should not be allowed to serve in combat. She is a survivor of sexual assault. He has been accused of it, an allegation he denies. A week ago, Ms. Ernst seemed as if she would not be able to get to yes on Mr. Hegseth. She said he would have his work cut out for him. But after a few days of intense pressure, her comments this week could not have been more different. ‘As I support Pete through this process, look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources,’ as Ernst said in his statement on Monday after a meeting with Mr. Hegseth, echoing Mr. Graham.” 

And that's how they're going to put him through, by pretending that they just can't know the things they've been told about him in detail. And that's just one of the three front page stories about accused sex criminals. Down below it is the federal indictment of superstar Douglas Elliman, real estate brokers Tal and Oren Alexander and their brother Alon, who are, the Times' writes, “accused of using their wealth and status to lure, drug, and then sexually assault and rape dozens of women.” 

Next to that is a long feature story about how the Brooklyn private school St. Anne's, in a show of high-mindedness, hired a staffer who eventually became a teacher, despite his having been convicted in an elaborate scheme to steal money from an elderly couple he was supposed to be the caretaker for. The Times writes that “within a year, he was posing as a teenage boy on Snapchat and soliciting sexual photographs and videos from students at Saint Ann's and other local schools, according to Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn District Attorney.” 

In non-sex crimes, the Times decided to go sexual anyway, addressing the Luigi Mangione CEO shooter case in a critic’s notebook column by Vanessa Friedman, “A pretty face overshadows a grisly act. From the moment the world saw the smiling unmasked face of the young man in the New York City hostel,” Friedman writes, “memes began spreading about his looks. In the days since, after Luigi Mangione was identified and charged in the murder of the United Health Care Chief Executive Brian Thompson, it has been impossible to escape his photo, or photos. They are proliferating. They are on television, in the newspaper, and all over social media. Not just pictures of Mr. Mangione from his booking at a police station in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or his mug shots in Prison orange, but photos of him in earlier times in a navy blazer, crisp white shirt and tie. Images of him hiking shirtless in the hills. In all of them he has clean shaven, curly haired, often flashing a bright white grin. Even his Tinder profile has made it into the public with more pics featuring his six pack. One commentator compared the stream of pictures to an endless photo shoot.” 

It's not quite as good as NBC flagging the cartoon murder investigation video game Among Us as an assassination game, but yeah, a socially active 26 year old left a lot of pictures online, as they all do these days. What's striking, in this critic’s notebook, is that the critic does not present any of the material that she's writing about. It’s illustrated instead with photographs of Che Guevara Charles Manson and Internet sensation Jeremy Meeks whose booking photo from his weapon charges arrest in 2014 went viral and got him dubbed the “hot felon” eventually leading to a modeling career. But there's no picture of Luigi Mangione in the article about how everybody loves pictures of Luigi Mangione. Because, as Ken Klippenstein reported yesterday, the Times has internally admonished people against using his picture, declaring in Slack, “as more details have emerged, his profile matches one of a mass shooter more closely than anything else. Mental health questions, shocking crime, manifesto, et cetera, et cetera. The news value and public service of showing his face is diminishing compared with concerns of amplifying the crime and inspiring others, something we avoid with mass shooters in particular. Let's be cautious today and in the coming days about using his image to illustrate the storyline on home and in alerts.” Somehow institutionally, this seems to mean that Friedman could write about how snacky he looks using words, but not support it with photographic evidence. It feels like there's a parallel here between the times declaring him basically a mass shooter, and the Republicans declaring Pete Hegseth's accuser anonymous, in using a shibboleth rather than actual judgment to get out of an awkward situation. 

And so on the jump page, a profile of the Mangione family is accompanied by a photograph of the driveway of the country club they own. The story “Suspect's Notebook Revealed Detailed Plans for Shooting” is illustrated with a picture of a bunch of cops standing around at the crime scene. The dead CEO does get his own portrait, on a story about his funeral. And then there's an elevated shot of the crime scene from across the street to illustrate “Response to killing reveals frustrations with health insurers.” 

Back on page one, in the second lead news slot, David Leonhardt is here to tell the readers, “Recent stream of immigrants is largest ever, surpassing peak years of Ellis Island era.” Leonhardt has already staked out elsewhere the position that this is a problem. So here it's just written up as a number story, using numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and from a Goldman Sachs report based on government data. “Annual net migration, the story says. The number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving. Average 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed 8 million people. That's the second paragraph of the piece. You have to go through 23 more paragraphs, which attribute the surge to President Biden's welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office, “before you get to the part where Leonhardt writes, “the recent immigration surge has probably ended.” So why do the headline and the top of the story talk about the surge in the present tense? Leonhardt uses Joe Biden's crackdown on migration earlier in the piece as a testing variable to prove that it was Biden's policies that had been responsible for the increased number of people entering the country, but he doesn't integrate the fact into his write-up of where things now stand in the country immigration-wise. We now have a president coming in on promise of mass deportation. Leonhardt notes that “the logistics of finding, apprehending, and deporting millions of people would not be simple,” but Leonhardt isn't really interested in the difference between an incoming flow of people and the ongoing presence of people. From Leonhardt's point of view, the people are just numbers anyway, as he makes clear at the very end, after finally noting that Biden had cut back on entries, is a historical echo with a century ago, Leonhardt writes, “the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s also sparked a political backlash leading to a 1924 law that tightly restricted immigration. Those restrictions remained largely in place for more than four decades.” That is one way of talking about the explicitly racist Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which shut down Asian immigration to the United States entirely, but it's not the most illuminating way. 

Rounding out the front page are a big picture of former refugees from Syria returning home, and a look at how the fact that Sudan has vast amounts of gold is exacerbating the civil war and famine there, rather than serving as any sort of basis for shared national prosperity. 

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 Socca-Ho. Our podcasting relies on the subscription and tip dollars of you, the listeners. Please do keep those coming. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.