Advice to protesters: Keep calm and carry signs

We are at a potential turning point in the public's view of Trump's deportation policy. Let's not blow it

6-12-2025 (issue No. 197)

Thank you for your attention to these matters:

• Rally, don’t riot

• Last week’s winning quip

• Terry Moran had to go

• It’d be a shame if you didn’t order tickets to Trump’s birthday parade

• RFK Jr. also has to go

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual jokes and this week’s contest finalists

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Good Sports — The internet has come up with a new statistic for Sky forward Angel Reese and the Colorado Rockies remain intriguingly awful

• Green Light — A recommendation of the MeidasTouch podcast

Rally, don’t riot

I’m fully behind the protests here, in Los Angeles, New York and many other U.S. cities against the Trump regime’s aggressive, ominous and seemingly indiscriminate mass deportation of noncriminal foreign nationals. The deployment of the National Guard and Marines on the streets of Los Angeles against the wishes of the city’s mayor and California’s governor has been a provocative overreaction that seems aimed at creating chaos rather than quelling it.

My advice to those taking to the streets — and I may be among them this weekend — is don’t fall for it. Keep calm and mind the optics. Don’t throw rocks or other projectiles at police, don’t set anything on fire and wave American flags — not Mexican or other flags — as a reminder to your mainstream, moderate voting audience that you are patriotically demanding fealty to American values and that the hardworking, taxpaying immigrants now getting the summary heave-ho share those values and contribute mightily to our country.

The goal has got to be to flip these polling numbers:

A YouGov/CBS News poll conducted June 4-6 found 54% of Americans support Trump's deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants, surpassing his ratings on the economy (42%) and inflation (39%). Additionally, 51% approve of ICE conducting searches.

An RMG Research poll echoed that result, with 58% backing the deportation efforts. And in an Insider Advantage survey, 59% approved of Trump's decision to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles in response to the protests.

And we ain’t going to do that by setting fires, scuffling with authorities or vandalizing businesses. We’re going to do it by focusing attention on the ordinary, admirable people caught up in Trump’s frantic dragnets and the frightening flex of military power in American cities.

There are glimmers of hope in the polling data:

Fifty-six percent disapprove of how (Trump’s deportation policy is) being implemented, according to the CBS/YouGov poll. A separate YouGov survey found only 39% approve of the administration's overall approach to deportations, while 50% disapprove. …

A June 9-10 YouGov poll found only 34% of Americans support sending Marines to Los Angeles, while 47% disapprove. A majority — 56% — say state and local governments, not the federal government, should handle the situation.

This image at the top of the Atlantic’s website Wednesday morning is a reminder:

The associated article (gift link) contains this passage:

One widely circulated photo—showing a masked protester standing in front of a burning car, waving a Mexican flag—has been embraced by Trump supporters as a distillation of the conflict: a president unafraid to use force to defend an American city from those he deems foreign invaders.

“We couldn’t have scripted this better,” said a senior White House aide granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. “It’s like the 2024 election never ended: Trump is strong while Democrats are weak and defending the indefensible.”

Jordan Zakarin, editor of Progress Report, takes issue with the call for protests to remain peaceful. He criticizes the mainstream media for “dedicating significant time to examining the etiquette and accessories of the protesters” at the expense of the actions of authorities:

As (Trump’s) shock troops stormed the streets of LA, beating and arresting protestors for impeding access to the Home Depot parking lot, conservatives have almost effortlessly shifted the narrative to a referendum on those who are standing up to the iron fist of the police state. … The destruction of a few driverless taxis has received far more attention and condemnation than efforts by plainclothes federal agents to seize children from elementary schools by lying about having parental consent. … Americans have been drilled into reflexively siding with law enforcement and demanding perfection of the oppressed.

I’m not sure Zakarin is right about the balance of coverage, but it’s certainly true that mayhem of any sort attracts more media attention than chants and marches. But when it’s the protesters initiating the mayhem, that attention is likely to backfire. Being a perpetrator is no way to focus attention on victimhood. And it’s likely to help justify, in the mind of the public, declarations of dire emergencies, insurrections, invasions and other excuses to declare martial law, suspend elections and so forth.

Substacker Robert Hubbell shares my view of the strategic advantage of calm but massive protest:

Trump is engaging in a slow-rolling coup designed to undermine our Constitution. He has hijacked the news cycle by provoking anger and scattered violence over militarized immigration raids. We must redirect the protests to focus on the unconstitutional actions of Trump. The ICE and DHS agents are bait. Ignore them. Focus on Trump's unconstitutional actions. Those unconstitutional actions include deportation of immigrants without due process—but much, much more. DOGE. Travel bans. Illegal layoffs. Retaliation against universities, law firms, and states. Weaponizing the DOJ and FBI. Redirect the protests to Trump's actions. … Whether there is a violent backlash is entirely within our control. If we de-escalate, there is no basis for the succeeding steps in the logic chain of cascading fears.

The data seems to confirm this: Harvard University political scientist Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, director at the U.S. Institute of Peace, studied 323 “campaigns for regime change or self-determination worldwide from 1900 to 2006 … (and) found that major nonviolent campaigns are successful 53% of the time, while violent campaigns are successful only 26% of the time,” according to NPR.

As these protests grow in Chicago and many other big cities, let’s be sure not to give the Trump regime the fiery spectacle it so clearly wants.

Last week’s winning quip

To all the people who said I wouldn't accomplish anything because I procrastinate too much ... Just you wait. — @ThePunnyWorld

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-jokes poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Terry Moran had to go

ABC News really didn’t have a choice but to part company with senior national correspondent Terry Moran in light of Moran’s splenetic late night social media posts over the weekend:

The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that's not what's interesting about Miller. It's not brains. It's bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He's a world class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world class hater. But his hatred (is) only a means to an end, and that end (is) his own glorification. That's his spiritual nourishment.

Backed up with some examples and trimmed judiciously by an editor (“let’s not impugn his appearance”), this could have been some powerful punditry. But Moran was not a pundit. He was ostensibly a straight-news reporter. And straight-news reporters are bound to keep their opinions to themselves or to couch them in the genteel categorical swaddling of “analysis.”

Readers and viewers need to trust that straight-news reporters will go where the facts lead them and relay information untainted by any ideological or preconceived bias. That trust is increasingly frayed, as Gallup reported in February:

About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.

Someone with a thoroughgoing contempt for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller can still write a fair and objective news story concerning him. I’m sure many reporters in Washington share Moran’s dark view of Miller and pull off this trick every day. But when a reporter puts that contempt on the record, it sows further public skepticism and undercuts not only the reporter’s work but also the work of his (or her) colleagues both at the news organization and in the mainstream media at large.

Though at first his punishment was announced as a suspension, there was no coming back from “He's a world class hater. … He eats his hate.” I would never accuse Moran of being at all impaired when he fired off the above broadside shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, but I will say that it has all the hallmarks of a drunk tweet — a rant unleashed in an angry, oh-what-the-hell moment of wretched judgment.

Those who were angry that ABC News chose not to renew Moran’s contract when it expires this week pointed to all the gasbags on cable news and tendentious print columnists who offer similarly withering assessments of political figures yet keep their jobs. But they — we — are designated gasbags. The public expects us to be accurate but not necessarily even-handed or objective.

Moran, 65, is now free to join the ranks of pundits and provocateurs. The hard-left MeidasTouch network (see my Green Light feature below) has already offered him a job in a public posting:

Your comments were proof that you believe in telling the truth without fear or favor. That’s exactly the kind of journalist we stand with. … You’ve covered the Supreme Court, foreign wars, the White House — and you've done it with clarity, nuance, and guts. We respect your record. But more than that, we respect your voice. And at MeidasTouch, your voice will never be silenced. … Join us. Speak freely.

With a post titled “Independence Day,” Moran inaugurated a newsletter Wednesday here on Substack, where all the cool kids now hang out. He’ll be fine.

Just in case you’re going to be in D.C. over the weekend …

You might want to sign up for two free tickets to the “50th Anniversary of the U.S. Army Grand Military Parade and Celebration” in Washington, D.C., on President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday this weekend. I mean, yeah, tickets are reportedly limited and you might not make it and the crowd might therefore look thin and that would be a shame. But contingency planning is always good.

By the way:

The administration has insisted that the Army’s anniversary and Trump’s birthday are a coincidence and that the parade is justified to honor soldiers’ sacrifice.. … Yet as focus squares in on the U.S. Army's 250 years of existence, other branches are notably left out. The Navy, which also celebrates its 250th anniversary this year in October, has no plans for a similar parade, a spokesperson told USA TODAY. Neither does the Marine Corps, for its 250th in November.

How’s that makey-healthy stuff workin’ out for ya?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised to “Make America Healthy Again,” fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisory committee Monday.

He said: “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” failing to acknowledge the role he’s played in undermining that confidence.

NBC News reported:

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known more commonly as ACIP, consists of medical and public health experts — including pediatricians, epidemiologists and geriatricians — who make recommendations to the CDC about who should get certain vaccines, including the schedule for childhood vaccinations. … Kennedy … rose to prominence as a high-profile figure in the anti-vaccine movement, has made a variety of specious and debunked claims about vaccine harms.

Public health officials, already aghast at Kennedy’s wild, conspiratorial ignorance and manifest incompetence related to most medical matters, nearly unanimously expressed fear and alarm.

The “clean sweep” ought to begin by giving this dangerously unqualified nutjob the broom.

ONLINE UPDATE: Replacement board members appear steeped in Kennedyesque crackpottery:

One of them, Dr. Robert Malone … spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming people were "hypnotized" into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, such as vaccination.

Malone, (other appointee Dr. Martin) Kuldorff and two other new members, Vicky Pebsworth and Dr. Cody Meissner, are all listed in the dedication in the secretary’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which attempts to undermine the former health official’s work and questions his motivations before and during the pandemic.

Land of Linkin’

• “Doin’ It Live — A timely televised play won’t save the republic” in the Columbia Journalism Review is Jon Allsop’s take on CNN’s live telecast last Saturday of the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck.” “I found the play to be confusingly paced and somehow off-key. … And the invocation of journalistic ethics—which climaxes with a hellish montage of modern-day cable-news clips playing over one another while Murrow stands onstage looking sad—is desperately unsubtle; at times, I felt as if I was watching a dramatized civics lesson rather than a work of art about real people who once lived and breathed.”

• “17 ‘The Pitt’ Behind-The-Scenes Facts That'll Make You Watch The Show In A Totally Different Way” is a typically breathless Buzzfeed headline, but if you’re as engrossed in this HBO Max series as I am, you’ll enjoy these nuggets.

• Related: “It Takes Two Puppeteers and a Custom Rig to Birth a Baby on `The Pitt’” is a Vulture article on the impressively vivid medical special effects that had some viewers turning away in moments.

• Harris Meyer’s article in last December’s Chicago Magazine — “The Day and the Hour: Should terminally ill patients be able to get help in ending their own lives? The Illinois legislature is grappling with that question” — sheds useful light on the topic still unresolved in the General Assembly.

• Related: In “What it's like to die slowly,” Substacker Colleen K. describes the harrowing deaths of her father and her sister and concludes, “I’ve seen the deaths of two of my loved ones inhumanely drawn out because of the limits of palliative care. We have to do better if we want a truly compassionate society.”

• Related: The results of last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel click survey on this question (see also Zmail on the topic) showed overwhelming support for the idea:

  

  1272 votes

• Tim Roznowski sent along “The day Milwaukee was the center of the women's basketball world,” a look back 47 years at the first-ever women’s professional basketball game. In the December 1978 debut of the Women’s Professional Basketball League, the Chicago Hustle beat the Milwaukee Does 92-87.

• Do you prefer it when streaming TV series drop all their episodes at once or do you prefer that the episodes be doled out one at a time? Here’s a my view and a request for yours.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ “I hope you have plans for this coming Saturday”: Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob encourages everyone to “show up at one of the many ‘No Kings’ protests … to declare our support for a government of the American people, not just the lobbyists, the tech bros, the crypto investors, the Heritage Foundation, the Murdochs, and the Qatari royal family.” Here’s where to find one near you—pointedly, though, not in Washington itself.

■ “Martial flaw”: Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein: “The U.S. military wants you to know—in spit-shined Pentagon statements, press releases, and social media posts—that it’s got everything under control in its deployments to Los Angeles. Except they don’t.”

■ Tuesday TACO trepidation: Message Box columnist Dan Pfeiffer sounds cautionary notes about Democrats’ embrace of the funny acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

■ Indicator reports that Amazon is selling hundreds of seemingly AI-generated biographies targeted at children.

■ Editor & Publisher columnist Rob Tornoe: AI is gutting the news industry.

■ 404 Media: “A spam scheme is filling university, government, and tech giants’ sites with AI trash.”

■ “Equal parts funny and amazing”: LateNighter critic Bill Carter praises Jimmy Kimmel’s new web series, “The Rabbit Hole,” satirizing online conspiracy theorists.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

This year, (the National Institutes of Health) budget …. wipes out $18 billion that we fought for over 10 years. And I can't understand that. … To think that this nation would walk away from medical research — for God's sake! We lead the world in medical research. Why would we give up on it? And I look at the specifics here: In 2025, 2 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 600,000 people will die from that disease. Yet your budget requests a 38% cut to the National Cancer Institute. Seven million people nationwide are living with Alzheimer's. This disease, of course, is devastating to families. It robs them of their loved ones. Yet your budget requests a 39% cut to the National Institute of Aging. … Northwestern University has not received a penny for NIH grants in 11 weeks. One thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine NIH Awards to Northwestern have been frozen or terminated, halting $81 million in research to date. … It includes $9 million in clinical trials for brain cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, childhood cancer. How are you able to reconcile these budget decisions with the reality of research and what it means to alleviate suffering and more importantly to give people hope? If research is underway, you at least have the hope that maybe there’ll be a cure, maybe in the lifetime of someone I love. How can you walk away from that? — U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., questioning National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday

Torturer time has certainly laid out his grim devices and I am paraded past them, like Galileo forced to view the Inquisition's flails and pincers and spikes. — Neil Steinberg on his 65th birthday

The easiest way to declare a state of emergency is to create the emergency. — Jake Vig

Calling Stephen Miller “Voldemort” is fun, but ffs “Baldemort” is right there. — Kealan Patrick Burke

Streaming (TV)’s tendency to expand stories over multiple episodes undercuts the propulsion needed to keep everything frothy and moving with enough economy that you’re less likely to question whether any of it makes sense. — Nina Metz

Ask yourself why ICE is conducting these raids in cities like LA and Chicago where they face vociferous opposition but huge agribusinesses in places like Kristi Noem’s South Dakota go untouched. — Jonathan Weisman

The worst part is that, after the divorce, Donald gets to keep the house that Elon bought him. — Uncle Duke

To anyone who wondered, what could go wrong if we elected as president a highly volatile, deeply dishonest, simple-minded cretin with a revenge fetish, the answer is this. All of this. — Betty Bowers

Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses. That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. … Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our Founding Fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government. There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility. The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom

Eggs have come down 400%. Everybody has eggs now. They’re having eggs for breakfast again. — Donald Trump

Why didn’t Trump call out the National Guard and the Marines when there was a true insurrection on January 6, 2021? — Marine73-77

The guy telling you that Los Angeles is on fire is the same guy who told you Mexico was going to pay for the wall and that people in Ohio were eating cats and dogs — unknown

Quips

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers then vote for their favorite. First, here is the winner from last week’s contest, which I neglected to include:

And here is the winner of this week’s contest:

Here is a quip from an unknown source that I considered too obscure to include in the written-quips poll below:

86 75309

Obscure because it relies first on knowledge of the mini controversy over former FBI Director James Comey’s social media post that showed seashells in the formation “86 47,” which some interpreted as a threat of violence against Donald Trump (86 being slang for “get rid of” or “discard,” and Trump being the 47th president of the United States). It also relies on memory of the 44-year-old pop song "867-5309/Jenny" by the band Tommy Tutone. You’re humming the chorus to yourself right now, aren’t you, Boomer?

The new nominees for Quip of the Week:

1. The Hamburglar is a criminal and I do not respect him. — @viktorwinetrout.bsky.social

2. Conflicted: I love playing baseball. Yet I also love crying. — @jakevig.bsky.social

3. “Sounds like a plan!” (Me when I wasn’t listening and can only hope there is now a plan.) — @donni.bsky.social

4. Sound cool, confident, and in complete control by starting a sentence with "Here's what's going to happen ..." Especially when ordering at the drive-thru. — @jakevig.bsky.social

5. Idea: A Glade PlugIn that smells like a gas leak for when guests won’t leave. — @woodyluvscoffee.bsky.social

6. I have been pressing “remind me tomorrow” on my computer update for 7 years now. — @traciebreaux

7. One of the lines I've inherited from my dad is, when an ambulance passes, you say, “You'll never sell ice cream going that speed.” — @hum_dunkin

8. This morning my son said his ear hurt. I asked, “On the inside or outside?” So he walked out the front door, came back in and said, “Both.” Moments like this got me wondering if I'm saving too much for college. — unknown.

9. You Don’t Have the Cards, Charlie Brown. — @huntergraybeal

10. I never chose to love Classic Rock, when I hit a certain age, it chose me. — @Brock_Teee

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why the new name for this feature? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.”

Minced Words

Cate Plys, Brandon Pope and I joined host John Williams on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. We discussed/debated the actions of the Trump regime in Los Angeles and the tactics of anti-deportation protesters, ABC handing Terry Moran his walking papers, the proposed tax hike on sports wagering, the proposed $1,000 “baby bonus” investment and the probable length of the sentence that former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan will get at his upcoming sentencing hearing.

John guessed 3 1/2 years, about a quarter of the 12 1/2 years prosecutors are requesting. Cate guessed 3 years, I guessed 4 1/2 years and Brandon guessed that Madigan will get house arrest but no prison time. One of our regular panelists, Austin Berg, who wrote the highly critical documentary “Madigan: Power. Privilege. Politics,” was traveling and couldn’t make the show, so I texted him to ask for his prediction:

“I wouldn’t dare guess!” he replied, “But former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver got 6 1/2 years.” Silver was 76 at the time of his sentencing, and Madigan is 83, which may figure into the judge’s calculations. I’m not going to make this poll complicated and so will simply set the over/under line at 4 years:

Poll closed after 430 votes

Traffic-light recommendations:

• John — A green light for “42 Balloons,” a new musical running at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater through June 29.

• Cate — A red light for “The Four Seasons” a Netflix series that, according to Cate, somehow manages to be terrible even though it stars Steve Carell and Tina Fey.

• Brandon — A green light for “Josh Pate's College Football Show,” a CBS Sports podcast. (He also seconded Cate’s red light for “The Four Seasons.”)

• My green light is below in the Green Light section.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Good Sports

Neologism watch: ‘Mebound’

Until a week ago or so I’d never heard the term “mebound,” meaning rebounding the basketball after one’s own missed shot. Detractors of WNBA Sky forward Angel Reese have been pointing out that Reese’s gaudy rebounding statistics are padded by numerous mebounds since she tends to play very close to the basket yet makes just 36% of her shots.

Essentially Sports noted that, last season, Reese more than doubled the previous WNBA record for mebounds in a season, though back then they were known as “z-bounds” after NBA player Zach Randolph who was known for the same thing. And this video is one of many out there suggesting that Reese’s statistics really aren’t that impressive.

I’ve seen estimates of Reese’s mebounds to rebounds ratio, but none that feel authoritative enough to cite. If you Google the term, however, it appears that it was her clunky performance around the basket that inspired this new and illustrative term.

So far, she’s just not a particularly impressive force. It was therefore astounding this week that BET named Reese as its Sportswoman of the Year for the third year in a row, beating out such top performing Black female athletes as Simone Biles, Sha’Carri Richardson, Claressa Shields and Coco Gauff, even though the Sky didn’t make the eight-team WNBA playoffs last year. And, as currently the last-place team in the Eastern Conference, they appear unlikely to make the playoffs this year.

Race to Rocky bottom

We here at the Picayune Sentinel have our eye on two questions:

1. Will the Colorado Rockies lose 122 games this season and take the record for most games lost in an MLB season away from the 41-121 2024 Chicago White Sox?

2. Will the 2025 Colorado Rockies finish with the winning percentage under .235, the low-water mark in MLB’s modern era (post-1900) set by the 1916 Philadelphia A’s? That team went 36-117 in a 153-game season (roughly equivalent to a 38-124 record in today’s 162 game season).

While these are still intriguing questions, I will post hypothetical standings featuring a team on pace to lose 121 games (a .253 winning percentage), a team on pace to lose 124 games (a .235 winning percentage) and the 2025 Rockies. As of Thursday morning after 67 games:

The Rockies could be close to pulling out of this season-long slump, given than 12 of their losses have been by just one run and another 11 have been by just two runs

Green Light

Green Light features recommendations from me and readers not only of songs — as in the former Tune of the Week post — but also of TV shows, streaming movies, books, podcasts and other diversions that can be enjoyed at home — i.e., no restaurants, plays, theatrical films, tourist sites and so on. Email me your nominations, and please include a paragraph or two of explanation and background along with helpful links, perhaps including excerpts from reviews or background articles. For TV shows, please include links to trailers/previews on YouTube and advice on where to stream them.

This seems like the week to point my overwhelmingly lefty readers to “The MeidasTouch” podcast, a ferociously anti-Trump offering on audio and video that won the 2025 Webby Awards podcast of the year honor.

Here is the Webby’s proclamation:

The MeidasTouch Podcast has emerged as a defining voice in political media, blending sharp analysis, cultural awareness, and a fierce dedication to democratic values. Hosted by brothers Ben, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas, the podcast has become essential listening for millions seeking truth, clarity, and action in today’s polarized climate. With bold commentary and unfiltered conversations, the show has reshaped how political storytelling thrives in the digital era.

In February 2025, The MeidasTouch Podcast reached the top of both Apple and Spotify's podcast charts. This landmark moment was a triumph of reach and resonance. The podcast has sparked widespread civic engagement, challenged misinformation, and galvanized a new generation of politically active listeners across platforms.

For its cultural influence, fearless approach to truth-telling, and its remarkable success as a driver of political engagement in the digital space, it is our great privilege to honor The MeidasTouch Podcast with the 2025 Webby Podcast of the Year.

They release several short episodes a day. They’re one-sided and over the top, often not quite delivering on their breathless titles:

• GOP Reps Lose It on Live TV as Trump Goes to War With LA

• Trump Kills His Term When He Does the Unthinkable

• Trump Has Disaster AM as Past Words Incriminate Him

• MAGA Mike Gets Bad News as GOP Betrays Him

And so on. Not fair and balanced, but often comforting. I’m not a fan of how the commercial reads in the podcast blend so smoothly into the commentary that you can’t always tell when the pitches begin. But I like that episodes are often short enough —15 minutes or so — that I can finish them while washing dishes after dinner.

The podcast is part of the MeidasTouch Network, which includes 13 other podcasts, a home page of news articles and a newsletter.

Mistakes were made

When I become aware of errors in the Picayune Sentinel, I quickly correct them in the online version, but since many of you read just the email version, which I can’t correct after the fact, I will use this space periodically to alert you to meaningful mistakes I’ve made. (Not typos, in other words.)

Last week, I confused the date of the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was 1960. And I transposed the numbers when I projected the final 2025 record of the Colorado Rockies. As of last Thursday, they were playing at a pace to finish 31-131 (now they’re on a 29-133 pace). The errors have been fixed online, and the responsible party has been duly shamed.

Info

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise. Browse and search back issues here.

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Thanks for reading!