By Mischa Geracoulis
https://www.projectcensored.org/2025-another-unprecedented-year-calls-for-staying-the-course/
“The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries,” wrote American author and social critic Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) in a 2006 article published during President George W. Bush’s war on terror.
Writing during an “unprecedented” US presidential administration, Vonnegut was lauding American librarians for resisting “the anti-democratic bullies” who had attempted to remove certain books from their shelves, and who’d refused to hand over to “the thought police” the names of persons who had checked out those titles. Because, Vonnegut said, the media lacked vigilance and failed to inform the American people of what was being done in their names, “only in books can we find out what is really going on.” He took to task a president preaching Christian values while dehumanizing millions, and waxed remonstratively about disenfranchised voters, The O’Reilly Factor, “pitiless war lovers” with powerful and unopposed weaponry, and war as profit and TV entertainment.
In 1988, Vonnegut had penned a letter to the year 2088 confessing some of the same problems he’d later write about in that 2006 piece and that we still face today — wars, nukes, eroding democracies, and climate chaos. For these reasons and more, Vonnegut declared that he was a man without country if not for books and an independent media that actually informed the public. To him, the United States, as the Founders had conceived it and Vonnegut himself once knew it, had become unrecognizable.
Book bans and censorship
Alas, American libraries continue to face political threats from anti-democratic bullies and thought police. The crusade against books and media is an assault on ideas, privacy rights, the right to form opinions, and the free flow of information.
Concerned about how Trump and Project 2025 could dismantle public libraries and schools, the Every Library Institute has compiled information to help generate greater public awareness and manage the potential increase in censorship. In a similar response to the incoming administration’s threats, the American Library Association has doubled down on its promise “to continue its defense of the core values of librarianship.”
No matter how many polls report the contrary, Americans care about important issues and really want to know what’s being done in their name. Americans want access to books and to read freely, and are opposed to book bans and other forms of censorship. Rest assured, Project Censored will remain vigilant in shining a light on independent, intrepid media—books and libraries included.
The “new normal” news
Entering into 2025, Vonnegut’s words read almost as if written today, with few exceptions. Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, once shocking, are now old news. Audiences are more fixated on the likes of Joe Rogan and other social media personalities and internet influencers who wield more political clout among voters than cable TV pundits.
The popularity of violence and war-as-entertainment has grown, owing to the infrastructure of social media and to the anti-democratic tech bros operating as overlords, moaning about censorship while formulating algorithms that demote content calling for peace and justice and promoting hawkish propaganda, extremist content, and far out distractions, such as the recently manufactured freakout over drone-sightings.
Twenty-five years ago, the world was flipping out over Y2K. It all came to naught. This is not to dismiss the threats posed by the incoming administration but to offer perspective.
Endle$$ war$
As to current war profiteering, it’s at least as much as, if not more than, during the Bush Administration. As Peter Phillips, author of Titans of Capital, has documented, “Permanent war spending is a critical stimulus for corporate capitalism.”
Data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show that “revenues from sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest companies in the industry reached $632 billion in 2023.” Increases were across all regions of the world but were especially sharp in connection to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Of the top 100 companies, forty-one based in the United States recorded arms revenues of $317 billion: half the total arms revenues of the top 100 companies. US lawmakers and their relatives have profited from these wars too, trading between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024, reveals a Responsible Statecraft analysis.
The 2024 fall of Syria features mechanisms similar to those employed in the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. At long last, Syria, too, is broken open and holds the promise of further exploitation by the West. In keeping with the imperialist playbook, Syria’s new leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—a US- and EU-designated terrorist since 2013, formerly of ISIS and Al-Qaeda—has been rebranded by the West and its accompanying media as a great liberator and champion of democracy and universal human rights. But as with imperialist deals of yesteryears, such as Sykes-Picot and Balfour, ethnic and religious minorities in Syria are left out of the capitalist equation.
Déjà vu
And yet, we’re told repeatedly that we live in “unprecedented times.” Unprecedented times is the new normal, wrote Jason Parham in Wired in August 2024. “The phrase, now a fixture of the zeitgeist, initially shot into pop discourse around 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, a campaign that fed on a specific American lust for political agitprop … Today, the phrase has magnified beyond actual meaning, a cheap emblem of our erratic cultural mood. It is uniformly used to describe just about every fresh hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the escalating dangers of climate catastrophe.”
Looking through a critical media lens, we see that we’ve been here before — or, perhaps, never left.
Trump 2.0
The organization Article 19 has stated that the self-serving instrumentalization of the “two interlocking freedoms — the freedom to speak and the freedom to know” to profit political agendas is deeply worrying. Trump and his acolytes have decried “being under attack by the ‘censorship cartel,’ composed of ‘left-wing activists’ and ‘depraved corporate news media.’” This is spun as justification to threaten revocation of the broadcast licenses of media Trump deems disadvantageous to his agenda.
Assuming that the turn of events in 2024’s last quarter accurately foreshadows the 2025 mediascape, there will be less critical corporate coverage of the political arena, especially of the incoming administration. There will be more acquiescence with the Trump White House and MAGAverse, more Trump-initiated lawsuits and authoritarian laws aimed at consolidating executive power; possibly fewer book publications on hot-button political issues; and the mission to ban books, school curricula and university offerings, and smackdown on student demonstrations and “the liberal media” will continue. Those interlocking freedoms, nevertheless, are enshrined in international law—Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—which we have the duty to uphold.
Trump’s inauguration will come on the heels of President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in Washington, DC. Carter’s presidency was responsible for implementing a foreign policy agenda that committed the United States to human rights as a fundamental tenet of international relations, and for transferring ownership of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians—something Trump wants to wrest back. No matter how hollowed out the U.S.’s commitment to these ideals has become, human rights — at least on paper — are expected to coexist with democracy, diplomacy, and national security.
Carter’s passing at age 100 on December 29, 2024, may serve as a reminder that a presidential term is fleeting in the grand expanse of history. This is by no means to imply that Trump possesses the moral caliber and decorum that Carter exhibited, but only to help put the upcoming four years into broader context. Reflections on Carter’s life also remind us that, regardless of who is in the White House or how illiberal democracies may become, the human rights agenda is more firmly planted on the map.
New Year’s recommitments and steady on
This next trip around the sun promises to be a wild ride, replete with anti-democratic bullies and the petty and nihilistic over-politicization of everything as we know it. The next four years will leave America even less recognizable to the Founders’ conception than when Vonnegut lamented some nineteen years ago.
For nearly fifty years, irrespective of who’s in the White House, how the Supreme Court is packed, how the Senate and House of Representatives are configured, or how uninformative the corporate media is, Project Censored has stayed the course. This year will be no different.
These early days of 2025 give pause to consider the political environment and remember that the work of justice and activism, as MacArthur genius Alice Wong contends, is “neither linear [n]or smooth.” Up against those in power who’d prefer to “erode our resolve,” we recommit to the freedom to speak, the freedom to know, and the free flow of information — those human rights that make all others possible. In these unsteady times, our fundamentals and guiding principles will see us through.
