Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Don Jr wailed when he learned DOJ was announcing more legal actions against Russian foreign influence operations. Did he know that the indictment against two RT personnel for using Tenet Media as a front would reveal Don Jr’s far right buddies demand $5 million to say nothing things about his Daddy?
In 2016, Donald Trump bragged he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and he wouldn’t lose any voters. In 2024, he’s inventing legal delays in hopes of preventing voters from learning the true horrors of his claim to have authority to get Mike Pence killed on January 6.
In 2020, Joe Biden, a member of the Silent Generation, offered a defense of democracy as democracy, which was enough for people who remember fascism and actual communism. In an era when many have forgotten that history and lost faith in democracy, GenX Kamala Harris has to do something more: She has to sell democracy, which Trump has been discrediting for a decade, itself.