Good morning. It is February 21st. The sun is shining on a slightly snow-dusted New York City. Yesterday's dueling forecasts between the Apple Weather app and the New York Times having been resolved in favor of the Times, and this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner announced that the team will now allow its multimillionaire full-grown adult employees on the field to wear beards if the beards are well groomed. Marking one tiny half step away from petty tyranny as the country otherwise accelerates toward the large kind of tyranny. 

Elon Musk took a break from directing the wholesale destruction of the federal government yesterday to put in an appearance at the conservative political action conference where Argentine libertarian president Javier Milei gave him a souvenir chainsaw, which Musk waved awkwardly around the stage before sitting down to take part in an interview or attempted interview, during which he wore dark sunglasses and struggled to string sentences together. Elsewhere on the bill, Steve Bannon appeared and ended his speech with a Nazi salute, leading Jordan Bardella, the president of France's far right and or neo-Nazi National Rally Party to cancel his own speech. Barron’s quotes him as issuing a statement saying, “while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.” The ruling political faction in the US is now so openly Nazi that the European Nazi movement is embarrassed to be associated with it. 

In other quixotic attempts at distancing, the front page of this morning's New York Post is a big, glowering picture of Vladimir Putin with the headline, PRESIDENT TRUMP: THIS IS A DICTATOR using underlining on the wood is a really misbegotten approach. If you're trying to put emphasis inside your emphasis, then you picked out the wrong thing to emphasize. For the occasion to mark the seriousness of the message, the Post replaced the page six promo box in top right with the flag of Ukraine, all of which just showcases Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch's confusion about what it means to be running a propaganda arm of the Trump administration. You don't get to use your paper to send Trump a message when you've already dedicated your paper to carrying Trump's messages. That's not the kind of influence that the Post or Fox can traffic in anymore. 

And the Washington Post reports that Donald Trump is planning to issue an executive order to, the Post writes, “fire the members of the Postal Service's governing board, and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. In an emergency meeting Thursday,” the Post writes “the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency's independent status. Trump's order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts.”

Moving to the front of today's New York Times, but sustaining the theme, the lead news story is, “TRUMP IS ERODING EFFORTS TO FIGHT MEDDLING IN VOTE / A RISE IN FOREIGN SWAY / Staff Cuts Ease Focus on
Election Propaganda and Cyberattacks.” So in addition to trying to put your mail in ballots under the Commerce Department, the Times writes, “the Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in US elections despite continuing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online. Current and former government officials said. The administration,” the Times writes “has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said. The cuts have focused on people who are not only combating false content online, but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyber attacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems.” The Times goes on to write, “Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.” All worth worrying about, but it feels a little quaint to be worried about covert influence operations and foreign ones. While Mr. Chainsaw is out there, aggressively and openly pushing misinformation as an integral part of the White House's day-to-day operations.

 Next to that is a news analysis column “Europe Fears Peril to NATO From Within / Alarm as Trump Takes Putin’s Side on Ukraine.” Same story that's been going on all week But this is what you do with your newspaper when there's something bad going on and you want to keep emphasizing that the ongoing thing is bad, you're allowed to just write a story like that to signal to the readers that there is no moving on from this thing. 

Meanwhile, across the page, Governor Kathy Hochul provides her case study and how not to handle a moment of crisis. “HOCHUL DECLINES TO EXPEL ADAMS / Seeking Strict Oversight of Mayor’s Office.” Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, the Times writes, “announced on Thursday that she would not exercise her authority to remove Mayor Eric Adams from office for now but would seek to impose strict new guardrails on his administration of New York City.” Instead of dealing with the problem at hand directly, as the city charter says the government should do, Hochul is proposing the creation of a state inspector general to meddle in the future affairs of the city rather than using her existing power to deal with the particular affair that's a problem. Somehow she's trying to carry out a nebulous future power grab while avoiding the present day responsibility of using the power that she has. 

Below the fold, the Times showcases its photographs from two days ago of the first leg of the final voyage of the S.S. United States, the fastest transatlantic ocean liner of all time, and the Times writes “the largest passenger ship ever built in America, more than 100 feet longer than the Titanic.” For all its immensity, power and ability, the United States was rendered obsolescent as jet travel took over the transatlantic passenger business. Unable to find a new purpose, it slowly decayed on the dock in Philadelphia, giving customers at a nearby IKEA an impressive ruin to gaze out at while they ate in the cafeteria. But now the SS United States Conservancy has given up on trying to fight the ravages of time and uselessness and is sending the ship to the Gulf Coast to be sunk as an artificial reef. The pictures really are hallucinatory. The online ones are even better. The immensity of the object and its faded and corroded paint combine to make the United States look like some kind of incomprehensibly gargantuan glitch on the landscape. 

And then down in the bottom right corner of page one, the headline is “Face of Germany's Far Right is a Study in Contradictions.” That face is the blue-eyed fair-skinned strong-boned visage of Alice Weidel, the head of the Alternative for Germany party. What makes her a study in contradictions? “A former investment analyst who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife in Switzerland. Ms. Weidel, 46, has become the unlikely face of the AFD. Her nationalist party campaigns on a platform that is anti-immigrant and defines family as a father and a mother raising children.”

That's not a study in contradictions. That's a study in the basic hypocrisy on which every fascist movement depends. The lead of the story is about JD Vance meeting with her. JD Vance is, of course, married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, which in no way stops him from slandering immigrants to cash in on the political enthusiasm of xenophobes. Weidel is a nationalist who basically doesn't live in the nation that she's so strenuously demanding the defense of, she's a politician who, the story reveals, doesn't know how many constituents she's notionally representing. And none of that matters. The point of fascism is to elevate civic vice into the position of civic virtue and usher one's followers into a world where they need not be constrained by consistency, integrity, or morality. 

And speaking of the malignantly empty vessels of the will to power, a reference box down at the bottom of the page, sends people into the paper for the news that Mitch McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader, whose vicious intransigence, gamesmanship, and contempt for democratic values, broke the basic structure of the American Republic and made the Trump era possible. Now and then, he's cast a few lonesome, meaningless votes against certain Trump nominees, including symbolically as a Polo survivor, registering his disapproval of his party's acquiescence to making Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But what he did the same day as his retirement announcement was to cast his vote in favor of the monstrously unqualified Kash Patel, a raging conspiracy theorist whose open public fantasies about using law enforcement as a weapon against Donald Trump's opponents can now be implemented from his position as director of the FBI. 

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. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to indignity and your tips. Continue sending those if you can. Enjoy the weekend after a four day week that felt like 40. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.