We are recycling the Third Reich and Richard Nixon rolled into one

RAW SEXISM AND MISOGYNY are the first but far from only shocks in Becoming Katharine Graham, a documentary that traces a time when the Washington Post was led by a shy, awkward, female publisher who supported fearless journalism even when she was terrified.

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And here we are, with another enemies list and a vindictive president already ticking off names: former FBI director James Comey arraigned Wednesday, sitting New York Attorney General Letitia James indicted Thursday. Who’s next? Sen. Adam Schiff? Former special counsel Jack Smith?

  The Bulwark

They're coming up. But as it turns out, John Bolton was next. I think they're first going for ones they think people won't care about. Smith and Schiff will likely call up a storm.

It is stunning to hear President Richard Nixon on the famous White House tapes describe Graham to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as “a terrible old bag”—and to not only reply “That’s right” when Ambassador Walter Annenberg called Graham “a miserable bitch,” but to then add, “And worse.”

It is chilling to hear Attorney General John Mitchell tell Nixon, as Graham weighed whether to publish the Pentagon Papers, that “if we ever convicted the Post or Katie Graham, she’d lose all of her television and radio licenses.” Graham got that message. And though those stations were propping up the Post financially back then, she published the classified documents anyway.

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Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr warned that “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and ABC responded by suspending Kimmel. It came four months after the administration detained Emmy winner and legal U.S. resident Mario Guevara for immigration reporting it didn’t like. He was deported to El Salvador last Friday in a case the Committee to Protect Journalists calls unprecedented.

Stand up and be brave. We're not getting out of this like we did with Nixon. (I remember being gobsmacked when he won reelection, but it crumbled rather rapidly.) We don't have any Republicans in Congress who believe in Democracy or the rule of law this time around. The very Post that Graham steered through the treachery of the Nixonites has been bought by a soulless billionaire and turned to bend the knee to autocracy. So many corporations and even some universities have turned tail. And we have a captured Supreme Court, making it all the more difficult. It's not impossible to recover, but it's going to take longer, and we'll have a different country when we get there. Be a Katherine Graham - brave even when you're afraid. I guess that's the definition of courage.