One employee said it felt like being recruited to the Gestapo.
— NY Times DealBook, "Crackdown," 23 January 2025
The quote's italics and darkening are from me, and from certain stylists — those tainted by Trumpism, especially — would come a criticism: The emphases are overcompensation, the quoted employee's distress should stand as it was, no flashing textual neon needed.
Like hell it's not.
The unfortunate employee and eager Gestapo are players in Trump's melodramatic farce of cracking down (story, title) on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, known to MAGA miniminds as the terrifyingly all-powerful D.E.I.
The private sector knew the commanding whip-cracker was serious about pursuing his silliness, "but," reports the Times, "the ferocity with which he has done so ... has set off alarm bells in boardrooms."
As it has in the public sector. Governments everywhere, from little towns to the Emerald City, are undergoing as well Trump's land invasion of the soul-snatchers. They won't have it, this D.E.I. jazz, not hayseeded country boys, no sir.
With extra force and ferocity Donald's whip is cracking on the backs of "federal workers," continues the Times. "[They] face 'adverse consequences' if they don’t report colleagues who defy orders to purge their agencies of such efforts."
One such employee's sensation in response to this silliness-turned-wickedly threatening bossocracy was precisely what any erstwhile free American's sensation would be: The smelling of the Gestapo stinking up the office, itself sniffing around for infidels and the occasional MAGA apostate.
The Times story is not about official measures underway to harness D.E.I., measures that can be a bit rough at times. It's about the stench of miasmic Trumpism and a despotism beginning at home — its home, the federal government, the easist place to begin.
Now that's a news story, a tale genuinely wicked, authentically threatening, the whole and very real fascism thing. Its gut punch: the quote. Or, the quote.
Not the quote in parentheses, the journalistic straitjacket in which the Times put it. And absolutely no way should such a powerful eye-opening mind-expanding quote be banished to the last slot of the story's third paragraph. (And again, no soothing, subduing parentheses, please.) Yet that is precisely where and how the Times placed it.
Hence my italics, the bold, some befitting darkness. The emphases are anything but overcompensation for a prodigiously monstrous story reported so underwhelmingly. Most newspapers readers never make it to a third paragraph and many rarely get beyond headlines.
But there are grabbers, stories that readers won't pass up because they can't pass them up. Creeping fascism in America is one: Trumpism's Gestapo-like snooping, its sniffing of federal employees, its demand for colleagues squealing on one another — now that's a story, to repeat, a story that readers will read.
Oh, and by the way, stories like this one are the whole point of having a free press. Only by reporting them aggressively can the press — and the rest of us — stay free.
Comments