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      BBC reporters cannot wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts in newsroom, says Tim Davie

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      BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general has said.Tim Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically. You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that.“So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.“I find some of the hatred in society at the moment utterly abhorrent, personally, really upsetting, but that is a campaign that has politicised objectives. Therefore, it is not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“And, for some people joining the BBC, that is a very difficult thing to accept. And it has not been an easy thing to get done this, and we wrestle with it every day.”Speaking about diversity and impartiality at the BBC at the Cheltenham literature festival, Davie also drew a parallel with impartiality when reporting on mainstream political campaigning.“I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable,” he said.The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavie was also asked whether he felt safe when he had been shouted at and people had come into his personal space.He said: “It’s not for the faint-hearted; these jobs in public life now, I mean, they are really quite demanding. I’m no great Californian hippy, but you have to look after yourself, you really have to.” More

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      Expanding variety at Royal Albert Hall | Brief letters

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      It’s good to see the variety of entertainment available at the Royal Albert Hall expanding (More rice, bigger chairs and reinforced toilets: sumo wrestling comes to London, 15 October). I know little about sumo wrestling, but I assume it’s not over till the fat man falls?Richard BarnardWivenhoe, Essex Perhaps King Charles can show he is a true monarch of the people by appointing one of his subjects from Yorkshire as a replacement Duke of York (Prince Andrew gives up royal titles including Duke of York after ‘discussion with king’, 17 October). May I nominate David Hockney or Alan Bennett?Colin BurkeCartmel, Cumbria It’s a minor point regarding Simon Jenkins’ column on the royal family (16 October), but I’d hardly call an eight-bedroom, Grade II-listed Georgian mansion in Windsor Great Park and prospective home of the future king a “modest house”.John De la CruzLondon Is this a new benchmark for shortest time in big jobs (Ange Postecoglou sacked by Nottingham Forest after 40 days as head coach, 18 October)? Has “Doing a Postecoglou” now replaced “Doing a Truss”?Phil SinnottCrosby, Liverpool A whole article about narcissistic personality disorder (15 October) without mentioning Donald Trump?Margaret Squires St Andrews, Fife Should the sun have been shining out of his arse (Trump hates this ‘super bad’ photo of him in Time magazine. I almost feel sympathy … almost, 15 October)?Andy Smith London More

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      The podcast showing what resistance looks like under Trump 2.0: ‘Where’s the progressive Project 2025?’

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      In a recent episode of Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter Podcast, the co-host Cliff Albright spoke with his guests about the power of resilience and community building during a time of uncertainty. Resilience takes different forms, he said, such as mutual aid drives or Washington DC protests featuring go-go music during the national guard’s continued deployment in the capital. “As food is becoming more expensive, and as food programs are being cut, whether it’s Snap or Meals on Wheels, you’ve got a lot of organizations and Black communities that are looking at: ‘How do we feed ourselves?’” Albright, the co-founder and executive director of the voting rights and community empowerment organization Black Voters Matter, said. “The best of our resistance has always included some form of taking care of ourselves.”After the presidential election in November, the Black Voters Matter team got to work. In late January, Albright, his co-founder LaTosha Brown, and the group’s legal director and chief of staff April England-Albright launched the podcast about voting rights and organizing to help keep Black communities informed. Their goal is also to dispel misinformation by engaging people who may be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s propaganda, Albright said, and need some “persuasion in terms of how to interpret what’s going on around us”. For England-Albright, she’d like for activists to build coalitions that learn from the shortcomings of past movements. Ultimately, Brown hopes that listeners feel a sense of belonging in the podcast and that they are encouraged to build community.Some of their guests have included Jennifer Wells from the community organizing group Community Change, Ife Finch Floyd from the policy advocacy organization Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, and Deante’ Kyle, host of the pop culture and politics podcast Grits and Eggs.In addition to the podcast, Black Voters Matter has also given nearly $4m in grants to local organizations including churches, neighborhood associations and NAACP chapters to help organizers canvas and mobilize voters this year. The organization also provides technical support to grassroots groups, such as training them on how to send out mass political text messages. A documentary about Black Voters Matter, titled Love, Joy and Power: Tools for Liberation released this year followed the organization’s work in 2020. Its use as a blueprint for progressive organizers, Albright said, “is critical towards the work that we’re doing now and to understand how we can win” in future elections.“I think that there is a sobering reality of millions of people in this country that in order to create the nation that we desire, we deserve,” Brown said, “it cannot, under any circumstances, be built on the same foundation of corporate greed and race and white supremacy.”The podcast’s inception began shortly after the election results poured in the morning after the 2024 presidential race. Brown sat immobile in her hotel kitchen in Washington DC, in shock that Donald Trump won after she sounded the alarm for years. Prior to the election, she and the Black Voters Matter team had travelled throughout the country to engage voters in an effort to build political power among Black communities.A wave of emotions ranging from betrayal to bitterness and then fear washed over her. “I just felt all of the weight of this Black woman being rejected when she was the best and the most prepared. She was the most patriotic. She was the most transparent,” Brown said. “It was like white privilege, dancing in your face.”“Do we not know what we’ve done?” Brown recalled wondering as she continued to watch the election results come in. She wanted others to know that they weren’t alone in their sense of despair. “I see our podcast like a lighthouse in the storm,” Brown said. It provides a space to discuss organizing strategies in the current sociopolitical environment.Ultimately, current movement builders are creating more clandestine networks similar to the Underground Railroad, said Brown.“What we’ve decided is we’re going to focus on our own wellbeing and creating alternatives for our community and for those who really want to see a multiracial democracy. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to keep building. We’re organizing, and when the time is right, you will know we’re there.”For England-Albright, the podcast helps amplify Black Voters Matter’s coalition building by hosting guests from other community empowerment organizations. “So often in this country policy has not exemplified that we matter,” England-Albright said. “We’ve always wanted to serve as a beacon of hope and light that we do matter in this country, regardless of policy.” Her personal experience working in the government has informed her view on Trump’s second term.As a former supervising attorney for the Department of Education’s office for civil rights during Trump’s first term, she said that she has an insider’s view into how the Trump administration has weaponized the powers of the executive branch in his second term. Project 2025, a conservative agenda published by the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, laid the blueprint for the Trump administration “to radically reduce the civil servants for the federal government and replace them with individuals who would pass a loyalty test,” England-Albright said. “The reason why he did that was because civil servants played a major role in essentially preventing and halting some of the darker things he wanted to do originally.”To survive Trump’s second term, England-Albright said that activists must build coalitions unlike “we’ve ever had before”. In the past, organizations were often singularly focused on issues, such as saving the environment or protecting voting rights. But this time requires an amalgamation of forces, she said: “We have to find a way to merge all of our individual desires or top button issues to become one, to create the kind of wall that is going to be necessary in this moment.”She wants to see progressives create a long-term strategy that ensures their policies survive in rightwing administrations. “Where is the progressive Project 2025?” She asked. “We have to create permanent laws, whether it comes in constitutional amendments, I don’t care, but we’ve got to do something that makes sure that our voices are permanent in this country.”Amid his disappointment about the current state of politics, Albright retains a sense of optimism by acknowledging that a fight is needed to get through the turbulence and pain. In the fifth and sixth episodes of Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter Podcast released earlier this year, Albright spoke to guests at a gathering at Alabama’s Dallas county courthouse to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On 7 March 1965, Dr Martin Luther King Jr led thousands of nonviolent civil rights marchers who were brutally beaten by law enforcement as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. “When I say love, you say power,” Albright said in a call and response with attendees. Love and power, Albright told the audience, is at the center of his work at Black Voters Matter. That weekend, Selma residents discussed their hopes and fears, focusing on the effects of gun violence on their community.“I personally often will call on Dr King’s quotes about love and power: ‘Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,’” Albright said. “So as long as we can be rooted in that; not the sentimental and anemic love, the love that’s bolstered by power, then we can get through this.” More

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      ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America

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      “From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb. “You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances.”The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.“The Martin case – the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history – ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now ‘post-racial’,” Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.Many of the essays in the collection were written contemporaneously, affording them the irony – sometimes bitter irony – of distance. Together they form a portrait of an era bookended by the killing of Martin and the return to power of Donald Trump, with frontline reporting from Ferguson and Minneapolis along the way. They make a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy.As Cobb chronicles across 437 pages, the 2013 acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, became a catalyst for conversations about racial profiling, gun laws and systemic racism, helping to inspire the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.Three years later, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, attended a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. Cobb notes that Roof told police he had been “radicalised” by the aftermath of Martin’s killing and wanted to start a “race war”.View image in fullscreenSpeaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.” More

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      The not-so secret language of fascist fashion

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      Fascism is back in style. Forget the old symbols: swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, skinheads’ shaved heads and combat boots. Extremism has a new look, and it is as fashionable as ever.Today’s extremist styles are more diverse and more subtle. Beyond T-shirts that advertise blatant racism, polo shirts with coded symbols create a shared in-group identity and signal support of violence to other believers. Tradwife-style prairie dresses and beauty regimens promote conservative visions of family. Clothing is a powerful tool to spread fascist ideas to promote authoritarianism and recruit new members to this cause.The far right’s weaponization of fashion to advance hateful ideas is not new. Fascist movements have long understood the power of aesthetics. In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini harnessed black shirts and the ancient Roman symbol of the fasces (a bundle of sticks with an axe, which stands for power and authority) to build his power and his brand. German clothier Hugo Boss, a card-carrying Nazi, produced the uniforms of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary and the Hitler Youth. Hate came with a slick, tailored look. In the US, the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan and burning crosses have long been trademarks of white supremacy. In the 1980s, the original fascists’ skinhead successors appropriated and repurposed bomber jackets, shaved heads and combat boots as their distinct form of military-ish chic.View image in fullscreenNow, welcome to fascist fashion 3.0. The aesthetics of modern-day extremists are far reaching and mainstream. Even more so since 2017 and the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, fascist fashion – or fascion (an amalgam of “fashion” and “fascism”) – is now at your fingertips. Right-wing groups have their own labels, co-opt pre-existing fashion brands and hawk their wares online via TikTok and eBay.Much of this ideological apparel can evade notice – if you are not in the know. Instead of blunt hate-filled slogans, the far right uses language like “my favorite color is white” and “defending our culture” – vague messages that could be interpreted in different ways and offer plausible deniability (however tenuously, because who is the “we” and what “culture” is under siege and in need of protection? And nationalist rhetoric has long been a favorite tool of the right).Coded visual elements and references are instrumental to conveying the message, to those who know how to read it. Use of specific fonts associated with the Nazi regime or those that look faintly Germanic – with dark, peaked letters – help groups to embed their ideology in what seems like innocent slogans or visual cues.Sometimes, the references come from other cultures or subcultures; today’s reactionaries reference Nordic symbols and imagery of “Valhalla”, as a nod to an imaginary past of white, hypermasculine Europe (FBI director Kash Patel’s recent promise to see slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Valhalla raised eyebrows). Gaming memes such as “Pepe the Frog”, which the alt-right has appropriated to convey antisemitic sentiments, also find their way into clothing.Sometimes the messages are even more coded. A T-shirt at a Nationals game with the number 88 and the word “nationalist” above it might not draw attention, but the combination is a celebration of a neo-Nazi sentiment (88 is a well-known white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler”; the letter “h” is the eighth letter of the English alphabet, and repeating it twice references the infamous salute).This new fashion no longer seeks to shock or to antagonize, but to appeal to a sense of identity and belonging, said Monica Sklar, associate professor of textiles, merchandising and interiors and curator of the Anne Barge Historic Clothing and Textiles Collection at the University of Georgia. “The idea is not being quite a subculture but to be embedded in the power structure. Instead of coding things to move away from the masses, this fashion is coding things to move into the masses,” and this is a purposeful shift.View image in fullscreenTake, for example, a black polo shirt with white stripes at the hems of the sleeves and collar from the activewear brand Will2Rise. It is sold under the name “3.0 Perry Polo”, a reference to the famous British brand Fred Perry, whose black and yellow design was “hijacked” by the far-right group Proud Boys since its founding in 2016. (In 2020, Fred Perry discontinued the model as a result). In the Will2Rise version, Fred Perry’s logo of golden laurels is replaced with a modern design of the white supremacist Patriot Front logo, which depicts an upright fasces surrounded by a circle.While valorization of masculine power and fitness is an important part of this new aesthetics, women – who are traditionally associated with fashion and adornment – also have a role in shaping the look. Adhering to traditional ideas of gender, the new Republican look of extreme plastic surgery and heavy makeup combines with tradwives’ 1950s dress silhouettes of cinched waists and flowery patterns to celebrate hyperfemininity.These styles not only allow their wearers to blend in, but they also play a role in normalizing an aesthetics of radicalism and violence. Sociologist and American University professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who studies extremism and polarization, has written that “it is simply much harder to recognize ideas as hateful when they come in an aesthetic package that doesn’t fit the image people hold in their heads about what white supremacists look like”. When the radical right looks like the mythical boy and girl next door, it’s hard to know who can be a threat.View image in fullscreenBut it is exactly this quality that enables extremist fashion to glide into the mainstream. Slogans like “White Life Matters” and other iconography found today on clothing and bumper stickers are reflecting sentiments that started much further to the right. Some of the symbols we see, like an image of a US flag where the stripes are made of machine guns, originated in the militia movement. By the time these items are circulating in the market, the message has been repackaged and toned down by a hair, but the ideas behind the symbols are the same.This is all part of the fashion cycle.To be sure, not every conservative or offensive outfit is fascist. Indeed, the lines between hate speech and hyperpatriotism can be blurry. As Sklar points out, “in the US, subcultural dress is much subdued, much more piecemeal,” and thus harder to define or recognize. Moreover, the wearer of these more mainstream, watered-down versions of fascist messages is not always aware of their extreme origins. However, sometimes, this fashionable choice is deliberate, and the decision of whether to expose it as such can entail great risks.To make things more complicated, as more extreme fashions migrate into the mainstream, we are becoming more desensitized to the ideas they represent. Fascism becomes a selling point with a commercial value. The Florida GOP is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merch without fear of censure. If only a few years ago appealing to racist sentiments might have brought serious public backlash, today campaigns such as Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans promotion only bring more attention to the company. Even Charlie Kirk’s death became an opportunity; some companies are branding his assassin’s T-shirt as the “Charlie Kirk Land of the Free T-Shirt.”View image in fullscreenFashion is not static. It changes all the time. What used to be in the margins a few years ago are now on trend. Brand identity can also shift. While in 2020, a Maga hat or a tradwife aesthetics would not be registered as fascist, by 2025, with Trump’s actions and statements becoming increasingly more authoritarian, those styles gain new meaning.Moreover, the Trump administration’s adoption of not only the Maga styles but those of the far right, aids in the shifting of the brand. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, wears tattoos that are associated with white supremacy. When Ice agents storm the streets of big cities with their ski masks, bullet-proof vests, and khakis, they often look more like the Patriot Front or the Three Percenters militia than representatives of the government.View image in fullscreenBut this new visibility also makes it easier to expose the fascism and contradictions behind all the freedom talk. Kristi Noem’s impeccable curly hair extensions and heavy makeup has earned the homeland security secretary the nickname “Ice Barbie”. Her appearance came to define the cruelty of the administration’s immigration policies. As more people associate certain fashions and symbols with actions and policies they oppose, the less appealing they become.Like we learned to recognize the more traditional fascist symbols, we are now learning to identify the new visual language of the right. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis warned in his novel, It Can’t Happen Here, that when fascism comes to the US it won’t look like the European brand. Instead, it would be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. In 2025, we also know that it wears a Maga hat and an Ice vest. More

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      ‘We’re fighting for you!’ Podcaster Ben Meiselas on taking on the Maga media – and winning the ratings battle

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      Ben Meiselas is a very busy man. So busy, he has to break off halfway through our interview to conduct an interview of his own, for his next broadcast. It’s 7am Los Angeles time when we meet via video call, and Meiselas is already well into another 18-hour day of podcasting, planning, interviewing, meetings and more besides. His “pro-democracy” channel MeidasTouch, which he runs with his younger brothers Jordan and Brett, puts out 15 or more videos a day, most of them presented by Meiselas himself. “I was doing another video before this,” he says, “and so by now I’ve already released one video I did last night, which was my 4am, and now I just worked on my 7am – it’ll get released any minute now. And then I’ll have an 8.30, a 10, an 11.30 …”The prolific output is part of the reason The MeidasTouch has become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the US, routinely beating the mighty Joe Rogan in both video and audio, and even overtaking Fox News in YouTube views. Rogan and others in the right-leaning podcast manosphere are thought to have swung the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favour, prompting much soul-searching on the American left about its media game, and why they need a Joe Rogan of their own; MeidasTouch seems to have stepped in to fill the void.That void extends far beyond just podcasting, in Meiselas’s view. He is appalled at how the US media has reacted since Trump came to power. “It’s a total capitulation,” he says. “They’re either corporate news – like cable news, [which is] just completely both-sides-ing the issues and intentionally ignoring critical, existential things – or they’re just outright state regime media à la North Korea and Russia: Fox News, OAN [One America News], Newsmax … All of these corporations are run by rightwing oligarchs; they are tools to ingratiate themselves with the regime for other benefits and other business interests.”The spectacle of CEOs and podcast bros alike “kissing the ring” at Trump’s inauguration cemented this impression early on. As counter-programming, Meiselas broadcast four hours of cute puppies and kittens, raising funds for the Humane Society.View image in fullscreenIf the left is looking for its Joe Rogan, though, Meiselas doesn’t quite fit the bill. Where Rogan is casual, rambling and often credulous of his guests’ outlandish claims, Meiselas is focused, well-informed and disdainful. And as you’d expect of a former trial lawyer, he speaks with an off-the-cuff fluency (“no scripts, no notes – that’s part of the connection I build with the audience”), and he brings receipts. If he has a catchphrase, it’s “play this clip” – as he illustrates yet another incidence of Republican duplicity/hypocrisy/incompetence/deception/authoritarianism with video, audio, graphs or data.He can be a level-headed interviewer – this week he has spoken to Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and newly elected congresswoman Adelita Grijalva. (He breaks off from our interview to talk to a former commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission about free speech and media monopolies.) But over the course of a typical episode – which could be a 20-minute solo broadcast or a 90-minute talk with his brothers – he often becomes audibly outraged at what’s going on.Put that all together, and tonally MeidasTouch is somewhere between wartime resistance broadcast and wrestling commentary. Meiselas is not above throwing out insults: the Republican house leader is consistently referred to as “Maga Mike Johnson”, for example, and he is as merciless about Trump’s health as the rightwing media was about Joe Biden’s. He doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind: “What the hell are these people even talking about?” “Stop making up things and defrauding the American people.” “These people are sick.” And MeidasTouch’s episode titles conform to the hyperbolic YouTube vernacular: “Trump is COLLAPSING under SHUTDOWN PRESSURE!!!”, “​​Trump LOOKS AWFUL as PRESSER Goes OFF THE RAILS”. One journalist described MeidasTouch’s commentary as “seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom [MSNBC host] Rachel Maddow is too subtle.”Meiselas makes no apologies for his house style. “I don’t curse,” he says. “I try to still keep it as much as possible appropriate for everyone. But on the other hand, I think where you have characters who are cartoonishly evil, like Maga Mike Johnson or JD Vance, framing them for the WWE cosplay characters they’ve become is actually an accurate way of describing who they are … I’m just trying to reflect the language of, truthfully, what it is that I’m seeing, and I think the growth of the network is the audience responding: ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I see it.’” He is speaking from the same home office in which his 5.5 million subscribers see him every day; it’s somewhat uncanny – as if I’m watching my own personal episode of his podcast.In his view, it’s other media outlets that are not meeting the moment. “We’re beyond a constitutional crisis. America’s living in a dictatorship right now. And the question is, how will an opposition respond to a dictatorship?” he says. “This is not a time to be playing games. People are waking up every day feeling, and rightfully so, that this is really life or death for them. We’re not talking about abstract concepts. People are saying, ‘I may not be able to afford healthcare and I’m going to die.’ So they don’t want to be lectured about, ‘Well, on the one hand; on the other hand.’ They want to be told directly, ‘What are you going to do to fight for my life? What are you going to do to fight for my healthcare? My community is under attack right now. There are masked agents who are disappearing human beings right here.’ Or, ‘I’m a member of a marginalised group’ – whether it’s a gay person, LGBTQ – ‘and I matter. I’m a human being, damn it.’ I think where we come in, very unapologetically, is we say, ‘We’re fighting for you, and we don’t waver on our values.’”This is what separates his operation from the forces they’re opposing, he says, despite their superficial resemblances. “You have to unite people with empathy and love and community and shared values as a force against the hate.” He’s all for building connections: communally, politically and internationally – given the global rise of far-right politics. “That, to me, is more important than, ‘Am I beating Joe Rogan this week or that week?’”View image in fullscreenMeiselas, 40, didn’t set out to build a media empire, nor did he really have to. Until about 2020 he was a partner in a successful law firm and his career was flying. The legal profession was in his blood, you could say. His mother practised law for a spell; his father, Kenny, is a leading entertainment lawyer whose clients include Lady Gaga, the Weeknd, Nicki Minaj and formerly Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was recently sentenced to more than four years in prison for prostitution-related charges. Meiselas actually interned for Combs’ Bad Boy Records for a few summers in his late teens. A Variety profile from 2019 claimed that Combs “took Meiselas under his wing, resulting in a precocious and priceless apprenticeship”, but he was not part of Diddy’s entourage or witness to any of wrongdoing, he stresses: “I was very low on the totem pole.” He was actually working on Diddy’s Citizen Change initiative, which was about voter registration for young people.He grew up on Long Island, New York, with his two brothers: Brett, who is five years younger, and Jordan, eight years younger. “We always did things together as brothers,” he says. “Like, we made videos, even in the early days of Adobe editing. We would do comedy skits together in the back yard for fun, and we would make movies together for our school projects.” Then, as now, Ben was the leader, it seems. A confident public speaker, he was president of his student government in middle school and high school, and of various undergraduate clubs. In his early 20s he interned on Capitol Hill, for New York Democrat Steve Israel, then for Hillary Clinton when she was a senator. “I would hand her the speeches before she spoke, answer constituent mail, give tours of the Capitol building – which was my favourite part about it.”He was one of the youngest students at law school, in Georgetown, Washington DC, but he only really became enthused when he began studying civil rights law. He was recruited out of college to a small law California firm and “thrown into the fire”, he says. Within three years, still in his mid-20s, he was in court handling significant cases of brutality and wrongful death at the hands of the police (he assisted the Guardian’s reporting on these issues in 2015), and invariably winning them. That led to representing Colin Kaepernick when the San Francisco 49ers quarterback sued the NFL for excluding him for taking a knee, in what seems like a different era (they reached a confidential settlement). He went on to become a business partner with Kaepernick and they remain good friends.View image in fullscreenIn retrospect, it could look as if Meiselas was destined for a career in politics, but it never really appealed. “When I became a civil rights lawyer, I actually started to not like politics, because politicians would start calling me up for money,” he says. “I still, and I say this all the time on the show, don’t like politics. To me, politics distorts from what the human issues really are.” He doesn’t quite rule it out for the future, though. “I can’t imagine it ever happening. I know it sounds like a political answer to say that, but I really have no desire at all.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was during the Covid pandemic in 2020 that Meiselas felt the need to get more politically engaged. Again, he doesn’t mince words. “I thought that Trump was killing people,” he says. “He would do these Covid press conferences, and it would be spewing a bunch of nonsense and disinformation. And me and my brothers were like, ‘Are you watching this? What the hell is going on? We need to do something to call this out.’”At the time Brett was a digital editor for Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show, and Jordan worked in marketing. The brothers began producing anti-Trump videos that started to go viral. One of them, with a #CreepyTrump hashtag, superimposed GOP insider Kellyanne Conway’s comments about Joe Biden being “creepy” over clips of Trump’s inappropriate comments about young women, including his daughter Ivanka. They formed a political action committee, to raise funds for Joe Biden’s campaign, but found simply placing TV attack ads to be unsatisfactory – “You’re renting space on their network, and they’re undermining your message with their both-sides-ism.”Then the January 6 attacks happened, and the brothers decided to start their own podcast in earnest. “We just said, ‘Let’s just put out our own show together, from our living rooms,” Meiselas says. “The quality wasn’t great, but the first podcast we put out, there was a decent-size audience and the feedback was great. And so we’re like, ‘There’s something there.’”Meiselas began phasing out his legal work, and fully quit the day job in 2023. As well as him and his brothers, MeidasTouch now has a whole stable of hosts, including Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer; it produces shows not just on politics but on legal and economic matters. And it is expanding internationally: in September it launched a Canada podcast. “For us, the strategy is just to try to be everywhere,” he says. And not just in the interests of expanding the brand: “It may be important in the future to have international hubs getting out the message, in the event that there’s additional kind of clampdowns here.”There is no shortage of material for anti-Maga podcasting at the moment, but will the world still need such granular focus on day-to-day politics once the Trump era comes to an end in 2028 (assuming it actually does)? Even the podcast bros who supported Trump, including Rogan and Theo Von, are now turning against him over issues such as the Jeffrey Epstein saga and his brutal immigration policies. “I don’t think anybody would have signed up for [this],” Rogan said in July.“I think there’s always going to be a Trump worldview,” says Meiselas, “whether that’s embodied in Trump, or a Maga perspective, or the next generation that’s going to push these ideas. And while we’re often framed as anti-Trump or liberal or left, I don’t see it like that at all. Because to me, it’s what Trump represents, and what he does, that I’m against. It’s that he’s laundering a set of ideas that permeate internationally, that impact you in the UK, in Europe, in South and Central America, in Russia. He is a vehicle and a vessel for these concepts that I think bring us back to the dark ages.”Either way, Meiselas’s 18-hour shifts aren’t going to end any time soon – but he is fine with that, he says. At least he gets to work from home. “When I was a lawyer and I would have trials across the country, I’d be travelling for weeks and months, and I’d be in Utah or New York or San Francisco or wherever,” he says.He married last year and has a baby daughter. “She just turned one, so I’m able to do some videos, I get to walk my little girl up the block, we walk back, I do another video, we have lunch together, I do another video. So for me, it’s actually a blessing.” But he laughs as he admits that he’s never really not working. “Even when I’m doing the walks, I’m always thinking a little bit about what’s next. I’m always trying to make the connections in my mind.”But it doesn’t really feel like work, he says. “I don’t wake up and I’m like, ‘Another day at work …’ I feel a broader sense of this historical moment and where the network fits into it. I feel every day is like, ‘This is what I was meant to do.’” More

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      A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter

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      A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.“For too long, the late-night talkers on network tv have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” the Ziklag email read.The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will “change that forever”. The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups”.The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.“Big news in the world of show business,” Metaxas began the first episode. “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Yeah. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artifact … by looking in the mirror.”There were a few titters from the audience, and scattered applause. Metaxas, appearing nervous, continued with the one-liners:“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. Yeah. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”This time there were some audible groans. Metaxas stuck at it.“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth,” he chortled. “The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.The first episode featured an exclusive interview with Carrot Top, the 60-year-old prop comedian. Carrot Top showed Metaxas some of his props, including a bottle of Bud Light that had a torch in the bottom of it and a dinner plate that had a hole in it. Carrot Top managed to say absolutely nothing of interest during the three-minute tête-à-tête, before Metaxas cut back to the studio.“Tonight’s show is loaded with talent,” Metaxas announced to the live audience. The guests included a TikToker – “for our generation, Tic Tac was a breath mint”, Metaxas quipped – Tammy Pescatelli, a comedian who has been absent from the limelight for at least a decade; and Danny Bonaduce, best known for his work on the 1970s sitcom the Partridge Family.Throughout the episodes – as Metaxas sang a song with a terrified-looking Victoria Jackson, a self-described conservative Christian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992 and has claimed Barack Obama is an “Islamic terrorist” – and as he continued with awful jokes about some scientists who had developed a robot that could build furniture but “cannot promise that the robot won’t swear”, it was hard to see what the point of this was.In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”In the pilot episodes, there were guests who were known for rightwing politics, but Metaxas largely didn’t ask them about those politics. In episode three, he seemed to decide he needed to at least say a bit of something to satisfy the rightwing donors funding this enterprise, but that came in the form of going over well-trodden ground about liberals.“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada,” Metaxas said in his intro. “Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”He continued: “Detroit’s sanitation workers – I just read this – they’re threatening to go on strike. Detroit’s mayor said not to worry, because Detroit will continue to look and smell exactly the same.”Another quip ventured into current affairs: “Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.It’s unlikely Howard knew he was appearing on what Ziklag described as a “faith-friendly, late night alternative”, but that’s perhaps irrelevant, given networks clearly passed on what is a confused, drab copy of shows that are actually successful.But while Metaxas’s effort to shoehorn a conservative show into the mainstream may have been lamentable, the fact that wealthy rightwingers are attempting to do so should be cause for concern, given the threat television is under from Trump.Earlier this year, CBS scrapped the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Colbert had repeatedly mocked Trump – weeks after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Trump has also called for late-night show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, who have both criticized the president, to be fired, while the president has overseen NPR and PBS being stripped of funding, having decried “biased media”.The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews. In the current climate, however, it serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon. More

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      ‘No reason not to be all in’: is Saturday Night Live ready to meet a major political moment?

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      Paul Simon sang The Boxer. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared with firefighters. When producer Lorne Michaels asked: “Can we be funny?”, Giuliani replied: “Why start now?”It was September 2001 and, just 18 days after the worst terrorist attack in US history, Saturday Night Live’s blend of satire, silliness and live music was back on the air. “In bad times, people turn to the show,” Michaels told Rolling Stone magazine 20 years later.SNL turns 50 this month and must once again try to meet the moment. This time, the crisis is not external but taking place in late-night TV comedy itself. In recent weeks, the genre has become the canary in the coal mine of US democracy.Over the summer, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ostensibly for financial reasons, though notably Colbert is a longtime Trump critic and CBS owner Paramount had been seeking government approval of an $8bn merger with Skydance.On 17 September, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show over comments he made after the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Hours before the suspension, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, warned that local broadcasters who aired Kimmel could face fines or loss of licences and said: “It’s time for them to step up.”The move prompted an outcry over freedom of speech. ABC parent Disney faced pressure from Kimmel’s fans, some of whom cancelled subscriptions to the company’s streaming services Disney+ and Hulu. Kimmel returned to the air six days later and mocked Trump: “He tried his best to cancel me and instead he forced millions of people to watch this show.”Now the spotlight shifts from CBS and ABC to America’s other major network: NBC. When SNL returns on 4 October, Bad Bunny will host with Doja Cat as the musical guest and five new featured players following several cast departures. But no moment will matter more than the “cold open” in how it deals with the current climate.View image in fullscreen“This would be one of the biggest, most important cold openings in the 50-year history of the show,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a co-author of Late Night With Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency. “But in the past, when Saturday Night Live has faced a major challenge, like they did in the wake of 9/11, they’ve risen to the occasion.”SNL’s mockery of Trump has at times earned the wrath of his supporters and the president himself, but Farnsworth advised against pulling punches, saying: “Saturday Night Live will face charges that it isn’t going far enough or that it went too far pretty much no matter what they do, so there’s no reason not to be all in.”Farnsworth, the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, adds: “It’s striking that a man who desires the spotlight as much as the president does, who wants to be a public figure as badly as he has over the years, doesn’t understand that criticism is part of the package that comes with power.”Launched a year after the Watergate scandal toppled Richard Nixon, SNL features sketches and live musical performances. But it is also known for covering politics and featuring politicians. The weekend update segment provides ongoing commentary while cast members often parody presidents, candidates and other figures.The most famous include Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase), George HW Bush (Dana Carvey), Bill Clinton (Darrell Hammond), George W Bush (Will Ferrell), Sarah Palin (Tina Fey), Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin) and Joe Biden (various cast and guest actors). Trump is now portrayed with aplomb by James Austin Johnson.Susan Morrison, author of Lorne, a biography of Michaels, recalls: “When Alec Baldwin was doing him, Trump was furiously tweeting right about SNL: it wasn’t funny, FCC should investigate, Lorne was over. Watching Alec Baldwin do his thing, it almost felt like bear baiting. It was so fun to watch the back and forth, and don’t anticipate that they’re going to pull back.”Politicians have also appeared as hosts or in cameos. Al Gore, John McCain, Jesse Jackson and Sarah Palin have all featured. Trump hosted in 2004 and, more controversially, in 2015 during his presidential run. Hillary Clinton appeared multiple times, including alongside her impersonator, Kate McKinnon, and Kamala Harris took part before last year’s election.The show picked up 12 Emmys recently for its 50th season and anniversary programming, including an award for outstanding variety special. Saturday’s episode will be scrutinised closely for how it deals with Trump’s attack on comedy, free expression and democracy – and whether it can make a serious point in a funny, unsanctimonious way.View image in fullscreenMorrison continues: “Lorne and his very smart writers will come up with some clever but on-the-nose way of dealing with this. The thing that it’s important to remember about Lorne is he’s been doing this for so many decades. He’s outlasted so many slates of executives. He’s a survivor. As Conan [O’Brien] told me, in the Game of Thrones of show business, Lorne would be the last man standing.“That isn’t to say that he’s going to cave but he will figure out a way to address this and stay on the air. I also don’t think the people at NBC or Comcast or the FCC are going to mess with him. He’s too much of a statesman in the TV business. But he’s going to come up with a way of dealing with it and addressing it and he’ll be funny about it.”Conservatives have long accused SNL of bias, arguing that the show disproportionately lampoons right-leaning figures while going easier on Democrats. Former head writer Tina Fey openly acknowledged a “liberal bias” in a 2003 interview, fueling the narrative. But Michaels insists that it is nonpartisan and willing to mock both sides.Morrison adds: “It isn’t to say he would ever be an apologist for the Trump regime; nobody could have expected that politics would jump the shark in quite this way. But he certainly would not hesitate to make fun of Democrats even now if they merit it and that’s part of it.“To quote Jim Downey, one of the show’s longtime writers, you never want the show to seem like it’s the comedy division of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Lorne is committed to that and that will help here as well.”David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Association dinner monologues, acknowledges that he has been on the receiving end.“I was in the audience at SNL when their cold open was about the Obamacare website crashing,” he said. “I was working at the White House at the time and I remember thinking, I’m not having fun. Everyone else in the audience seemed be having a better time than I was.”Writing comic material under time pressure is tough, Litt says, and that will be the SNL team’s top priority for the new season. He said: “This is a show that rises to a pretty intense challenge every week and I assume they’re going to be thinking about rising to the exact same challenge, which is, how do we turn around a show that is good and funny because that’s hard enough without having the president of the United States breathing down your neck.“That’s part of what infuriates Trump so much about comedians. It’s not that they’re making fun of him, it’s that the audience is laughing. It’s connecting. If Kimmel or Colbert or weekend update was making a joke about Trump and the audience was rejecting that joke, I don’t think Trump would care. It’s the fact that it exposes him as still, despite everything, a fundamentally laughable person, or at least a human person.”Litt, whose new book, It’s Only Drowning, is about his unlikely friendship with a Joe Rogan fan, adds: “I can’t imagine that people are going to be sitting around a writers’ room saying, how do we address this as though they were journalists. I think they’re saying, how do we do funny stuff? Because doing funny stuff is really hard.”SNL has already used up one potential Trump gag. Its cold open on 9 November last year, the first weekend after Trump won the presidential election, was entitled SNL for Trump and had cast members sarcastically trying to get on Trump’s good side, singing: “We will, whatever you want.” The sketch was a satirical take on the public figures and institutions that had shifted their stances or expressed deference to Trump for political or personal gain.Bill Carter, author of the book The Late Shift and executive producer of the CNN docuseries The Story of Late Night, says: “The gauntlet has been thrown now and, if they don’t do something, they will disappoint people. People will be expecting their take and their take won’t be the most obvious one. It’ll be some creative way of approaching it. They have a very good Trump right now so they ought to use him.”Trump has frequently railed against SNL over the years and is likely to be watching its return with fingers poised for a hot take on the cold open. But like Morrison, Carter thinks it unlikely that SNL will suffer the same fate as Colbert or Kimmel.“Unlike those shows, Trump cannot say this has terrible ratings and does not make money,” he says. “Saturday Night Live does not have terrible ratings. In fact, with the right host, it will often be among the most watched shows on television. And it has the best demographics on any show on television except for sports.“The idea that they would abandon that show is nuts, because if they did, some streaming service would say, we’ll put on Saturday Night Live. It’s 50 years that show’s been on. It’s had an audience all those times of a new generation of viewers. It continues to do that so it’s a tremendously valuable franchise. NBC is not walking away from that show. I don’t care what pressure they put on it.” More