The NYT has a devil of a time reporting those "details"

Can you see how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? wrote Hannah Arendt in a 1953 letter to philosopher Karl Jaspers.

The symptoms of McCarthyism's sociopolitical decay — its striking distance and immense velocity — had a well-known cause: A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves, as contemporaneously articulated by Edward R. Murrow. What's more, Arendt and Murrow's diagnosis came with an equally well-known and even more useful prognosis: Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order.

That, as noted by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago, expressed the antithesis of his two-volume title, Democracy in America. And about that — tyranny's exploitation of good societal order — it's true that most Americans are going about their business as though nothing particularly troublesome is occurring; one exception: a deep appreciation of the seemingly existential crisis of egg prices.

But enough of "that." You've already read it dozens of times from untold commentators; of such warnings and admonitions we have no shortage. The nation's singularly crippling deficit lies elsewhere — in its majority's spine. Neither shall I go on about how ignorant, weak and complacent we are, however, since that too I've already done and you've already read here, there, everywhere a free press has breath, as still, or rather momentarily, permitted by Tocqueville's aforementioned antithesis.

What I prefer alternatively is to observe the almost imperceptible insidiousness of what helps to bring us so low. This I can do because its done by quite notable people who both know (or should know) better and claim to be on the side of democracy's angels. Which is to say, three reporters and I assume at least a couple of editors at yesterday's New York Times splattered this headlne — "White House Denies Violating Judge's Order in Deporting Venezuelans" — at the tippy-top of the Grey Lady's front page.

Fascinating, I thought when seeing it, also seeing how the White House had just flagrantly violated a federal judge's order. What really fascinated, though, I further thought, would be in learning from the NYT precisely how the Wolf's Lair denied its violation. The paper obliged:

The Trump administration [said] the president had broad powers to quickly expel them.... The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also asserted in a statement that the federal courts "have no jurisdiction" over the president’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.... Attorney General Pam Bondi criticized the judge on Saturday night in a statement, writing that ... his order "disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power."

In other words, in no way did the White House deny it had violated a federal court order. Indeed it was the paper of record's headline that stood in flagrant violation of both its contradictory, obediantly stenographic text and the story's grim reality — the latter being a little something, I should think, that The New York Times would otherwise care to splatter across its front page.

THIS: "The White House Tells a Federal Court It's Not Subject to the U.S. Justice System." Granted, the headline would not be news, given that Trump kindly let us know in February that "He who saves his Country does not violate any law." What is news is that yesterday, for the first yet hardly last time, the Trump regime operationally carried out its leader's proclamation of absolutely unfettered legal lawlessness.

In most other nations, such a leader is known as a dictator. Here, the free press prefers the gentler p-title, as does the censored press in Russia with its dictator, America's closest friend and ally.

The larger and in this post more important point is the insidiousness of the nearly imperceptible. Vast numbers of newspaper readers glance at headlines, nothing more, hence here they'd see a (false) White House denial, perhaps register "the fact," and move on. Yet even those readers who persevered, proceeding to the story's text, would, in view of America's pandemic of uncritical thinking, cast their eyes on the Times' truthless slop and register that instead.

What cannot be accomplished overnight is an improvement in millions of minds' rather easily acquired ability to analyze — not just absorb — what the eyes are reading. What can be accomplished, and done so quite literally overnight, is the legacy press' willingness to spell out in plain, direct English for its unanalytical readers the grim reality of just what in this hell of Trumpism's dictatorship is going on.

After all, if a visiting Frenchman could see its potential peril two-hundred years ago, surely native-born newspapers such as The New York Times could report on what Orwell said is right in front of one's nose, even if that effort is a "constant struggle" — though I cannot imagine why.

As an aside, I should note that the Times did report in this very same story that the "president .. has sidestepped due process and ordered sweeping arrests." Jolly good hard-hitting journalistic show — except the president the paper hit is El Salvador’s, Nayib Bukele.