FAIR = Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Tanya Clay House about erasing history for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Washington Post (3/30/25)
Janine Jackson: Historians, teachers, community leaders and racial justice advocates are rallying around the National Museum of African American History and Culture, as the Trump White House has set its destructive sights on it as part of the effort to erase Black history from US history, to claim that any accurate acknowledgement of Black people’s lives in this country “deepens societal, divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made.”
We’ve heard this song before. There are few more radical ways to oppress people than to suppress their history, their experiences, their voices, to insist that only ever more wonderful things have happened in the United States, and that only that fairytale is acceptable to tell or to hear. The harm wrought—and, to be clear, intended—is not just to Black people, but to the very concept, the aspiration of multiracial democracy.
Which is why the Freedom to Learn network, and its #HandsOffOurHistory campaign, comprise so many groups and communities. The coalition was convened by the African American Policy Forum, where our guest is senior strategist, and where I serve as a board member.
Tanya Clay House has worked for years on supporting democracy by supporting communities of color’s right to vote, including work with the American Bar Association, the Hip Hop Caucus and the Kairos Democracy Project, as well as as an independent consultant. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tanya Clay House.
Tanya Clay House: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Instagram (4/30/25)
JJ: I just saw Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, from the African American Policy Forum, doing a kind of video minute about Bruce’s Beach, a California property where Black families were living in the ’20s—too happily for the likes of their white neighbors, who had the city seize the land under eminent domain, saying it’d be used for a public park, and then leaving it undeveloped once they’d achieved the obvious goal of driving the Black people out.
That’s just some of the flavor of this kaleidoscopic project. Tell us more about what #HandsOffOurHistory and Freedom to Learn are doing, and hoping to do.
TCH: Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak about this. So we’re at a time—and I hesitate to say this is a critical time; it’s been critical for a long time—there are things that are occurring within our country that many maybe never thought would come back, because we thought we had at least evolved on a certain level to not engage in revisionist history, to not go backward towards the times when we are qualifying people based upon their skin color, that we are continuing to demean and to engage in actions that really undermine the value of people, culture, in order to stoke fear, in order to maintain power of, essentially, the white majority.
Unfortunately, we are at that time point, at that place again, where we are essentially this generation’s civil rights movement. We have a coalition of organizations that convened about three years ago under the Freedom to Learn banner, in order to really speak out against the beginning stages of attempting to eradicate our history.
Popular Information (2/2/23)
The push to eliminate African-American studies and pull out certain teachings, particularly Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s teachings, within African-American studies courses, this had moved through Florida and all the way up through College Board standards, and there was a galvanizing of organizations in order to push back on what we saw occurring, because it was undermining the ability of students to learn their history.
So we came together three years ago, and then again last year under the same banner, because book bans had evolved, book bans across the country in every state, and we were really trying to raise the specter and bring it to people’s attention, what this is doing, coming after the culture, and coming after freedom of thought.
And this was actually the playbook of Project 2025, and now, unfortunately, another year later, we are living Project 2025. We are living that playbook, of not only the book ban, not only the erasure, the undermining of African-American studies courses, but the direct targeted attacks on all things diversity, equity and inclusion, which is really another way of targeting Blackness, and targeting those that are other, trying to other people, and saying that, in fact, this country is not inclusive; in fact, it is only that for the white majority.
And so Freedom to Learn is really focused. We recognize that it can no longer just be a day—we were galvanizing on one day every year—but also to continue that drumbeat. But this year, we had a whole week, Freedom to Learn Week of Action. And it’s because of, you mentioned the executive order that is specifically targeting Black history, and the Black museum mentioned and called out is the National Museum for African-American and Culture, otherwise called the Black Smithsonian, here in DC, but also Black museums across the country.
And so we are galvanizing and bringing people together to lift up all of the things that I’ve discussed, and to really focus on what this is doing to our country, and how it is completely undermining the freedom of thought, how it is essentially engaging in replacement theory, and how we are in need of a movement to ensure that we do not repeat the sins of our past.
JJ: I get frustrated when news media say “the White House is seeking to undermine Black studies, Black museums and cultural institutions.” And, first of all, that that’s somehow in the interest of “ending divisions.” I don’t know how you even type the words that Donald Trump wants to end divisions.
But then, the idea that somehow it’s only Black people who are harmed, or only Black people who care, when we’re talking about history and, as you say, freedom of thought in its essence. This is of interest, or should be of concern, to absolutely everyone.
TCH: You’re absolutely right. Our slogan and its hashtag is #HandsOffOurHistory, because Black history is American history, it is all of our history, and it is crucial to understand how this country’s evolved. You can look at the failures of America in one way as, OK, these are the challenges, these are the problems, these are the atrocities that America has engaged in, but you can also say, it’s also what we’ve overcome, or are attempting to overcome, and move forward on.
And so if you look at it only as the way that this administration is stating, that it’s a divisive concept, that is the fear of acknowledging the past, and where America has come from, and the ideals that they have been attempting to achieve. It’s not acknowledging all of the great evolution and the work that people have been engaged in, in order to achieve the ideals that are ingrained within our Constitution, that are ingrained within the American psyche, of freedom and liberty, freedom of thought, that people are created equal and have equal opportunity. In fact, this administration seems to be completely counter to that, and not wanting others, only wanting a certain segment of this population, to actually be free, essentially.
And so that’s why they’re targeting, and stating that anything that interrupts or upsets that power dynamic of those that are currently in power, that therefore it’s considered divisive. And the first target right now, particularly, is Black history. And Black history, though, if you don’t understand and you don’t learn it, all people are at a disadvantage, because that is also a critical component of how it is that our civil rights infrastructure has been established, and how we ensure protections for all people, for women, for LGBTQ Americans, for Latinos, for Asians, for anyone who is not a white majority. So I think that simply declaring in a statement that it’s a divisive concept is ignorant, is the best that I can say at this point.
USA Today (5/5/25)
JJ: And I think that there are plenty of white people who also would say, We also want to learn the history of this country, the real history of this country. Please don’t speak in our name and say you’re protecting us from it, because it’s actually part of what white people need to learn, and want to learn as well.
I don’t know if you have any particular thoughts about reporting. Apart from USA Today‘s Deborah Barfield Berry, and a lot of folks at a local level, I haven’t seen much attention to Freedom to Learn. But part of what I’m learning is how much you can grow and maintain healthy lines of communication outside and around the news media narrative. The Banned Books Tour that you referenced went straight to schools and campuses, and set up shop and spoke directly to people. But media coverage can still help or hurt in some ways.
TCH: Yeah. We know that there has to be a groundswell in local communities as well, that it’s not going to be, as was said in a different context, “the revolution will not be broadcast.” We have to be on the ground, engaging in one-on-one contact, and that’s what we’re doing in many ways. The Freedom to Learn Week of Action this year is about getting into communities and giving people ways to engage at their local level, to obtain a digital library card that gives young people access to all of the books that have been banned.
And that is hundreds, hundreds of books that have been banned. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, learning about Ruby Bridges, To Kill a Mockingbird. These are readings that I grew up on, learning and understanding America, and it really helped to gauge, and to direct how I understood, how this could be in the society. Our children now don’t have access to that.
So we have the digital library cards that people can have there for free. We have every library. We’re partnering with them on sending letters to the editor, to your local papers, speaking to the fact that this is our history, Black history, it’s all of our history. That you’re actually engaging in revisionist history by trying to erase and not talk about what has happened in the past. Because if you do that, you’re not going to learn from it.
Tonya Clay House: “This administration is intent on repeating the sins of the past, which is why they don’t want people to learn about what happened in the past.”
And in fact, what we believe is happening is this administration is intent on repeating the sins of the past, which is why they don’t want people to learn about what happened in the past.
We have other ways in which we’re also engaging. We’re telling people to make your own video. Like you mentioned, Dr. Crenshaw uplifted the historic sites that are in your own community, that you may not know about because things are being removed. It’s not just monuments, but historic land properties, artifacts as we’ve been hearing about, things that often are on loan in different museums. If you can lift that up, take a selfie of yourself, #HandsOffOurHistory. That’s the tagline.
We’ve got a number of different ways in which we’re engaging and wanting people to uplift, but particularly on May 3, if you’re here in the DC area, we’re encouraging people to come join us, because we’re going to be gathering together on the steps of the John Wilson Building to speak to this issue of erasure, and how we’re going to reaffirm Black history. We have a Black history affirmation that we have on our Freedom to Learn website, and we have civil rights leaders from across the country and locally as well, as well as employees of the Smithsonian and others that are going to be speaking, faith leaders. We’re all coming together and we’re saying, hands off our history, and we want to show that we’re not going to allow this to happen, because this is all of our history.
And so we do want everybody to take a moment. There are ways that everybody can do just one thing, at least something. And everybody may not be able to do the marches, or not be able to do, maybe, the video. But maybe you can get the digital library card, or maybe you can give money. There are different ways in which people can engage, and we’re trying to give you all the ways to help you do that.
JJ: All right, then. We’ll end on that note of participation. We’ve been speaking with Tanya Clay House, consultant and senior strategist at the African American Policy Forum, among many other things. Tanya Clay House, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TCH: Really appreciate it, thank you for having me.
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This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein)
Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that.
Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.
Janine Jackson interviewed CODEPINK’s Danaka Katovich about attacks on activists for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin
Janine Jackson: It is misleading to portray public protest simply in photos of people being dragged off the street by law enforcement, because protest and dissent take many forms, some less visible than others. Still, the people in those photos have meaning for us, about being vocal and visible in frightening times. If standing up and speaking out loud in oppressive times were easy, well, there’d be less oppressive times, wouldn’t there? Whatever one’s imaginings about what they woulda, coulda done, the reality is that it is not a walk in the park to protest in person, knowing that you may face a lethally armed officer, tasked with grabbing you and throwing you in a cell, with the weight of the state behind them.
The state also has many forms of attacks on protesters and protest, and those are not always so visible, either. All of that is in play right now, and here to talk about it is Danaka Katovich, national co-director of the group CODEPINK. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Danaka Katovich.
Danaka Katovich: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: I know that you see what’s happening to CODEPINK as just a piece of a bigger issue, but maybe first tell us a little about what’s been happening to CODEPINK in the last few months.
Common Dreams (3/27/25)
DK: Yeah. I think this new wave started with Sen. Tom Cotton, who’s the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was at a hearing, during a CODEPINK disruption of the hearing, he stated, like it was a fact, that CODEPINK is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. We’re not, but someone in such a high position of power saying that is difficult to navigate, scary; you wonder what they’re going to do next.
And the very next day or two days later, Sen. Jim Banks, in a different Senate hearing, repeated and regurgitated the same lies about us, and asked Pam Bondi to investigate CODEPINK for these fake and not real ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
And they’re doing that to—you know, we’re very in their face. We’re in Congress every single day, challenging them on the genocide in Gaza, and their support for the genocide in Gaza, and their constant willingness to ignore the American public. It’s their job to listen to the American public and represent us, but they don’t do that. And we’re very in their face, and they’re trying to intimidate us, and scare us into being quiet.
JJ: MAGA couldn’t hate CODEPINK any more than they do, to the extent that they know you exist. So is the hope to isolate CODEPINK, even among other pro-Palestinian groups?
DK: I don’t think so, to be honest. In my honest assessment, I think they are going after us because we’re a well-known group—online, at least—and we post everything that happens to us, and all the interactions that we have, to educate the public on what’s really going on in Congress. So I don’t think it’s to isolate us from the Palestine movement. If it is, it’s absolutely not working.
CODEPINK (4/30/25)
JJ: I sense that CODEPINK, along with other groups, understands that you have to talk around dominant media narratives. I just saw a message today talking about how simple it is to want a child born in Gaza to live. I think people can get explained away from that basic human understanding, told that politics is over your head and let smarter folks decide. But folks who don’t do organizing think maybe you just come up with a magic message, but it’s much more human to human than that, isn’t it?
DK: Oh, absolutely. And that’s what’s really rooted me in this work, is our position on this is not fringe. A poll came out last week that said 70% of Democratic voters do not support sending weapons to Israel. That is so vastly different than what that poll would’ve been two years ago, or was two years ago.
I’ve not had to read a million books—I mean, I have, but a lot of people haven’t read a million books—to have the opinion that Palestinians in Gaza, and children in Gaza, deserve every single right to dignity and life that any person on this Earth has.
Because we’re seeing their faces, we’re hearing their voices. We see what they’re going through on our phones every single day. There’s no shortage of content coming out of Gaza that Palestinians have demonstrated their humanity in the worst situations of their life. And I think people don’t have to be even politically aware to not support what’s going on in Palestine.
JJ: The expansive and transparently intimidating effort, the work that’s being applied against CODEPINK, to say you’re funded by Communist China, that’s meant to keep folks from listening to you, or thinking about what you have to say. But that intimidation could be applied to anyone that they designate they don’t want us to hear from. So it’s not like they’ve set themselves any guardrails. This is a bigger thing.
CNBC (4/29/25)
DK: Yeah. What’s funny is this morning, before we did this interview, the Trump administration was doing a press conference about Amazon. Amazon said that they were going to post the prices for how the tariffs are affecting consumers, and the Trump administration and the press secretary, I can’t remember her name, said Amazon is partnering with a Communist China propaganda arm.
JJ: Right. So it’s a go-to.
DK: It’s literally whoever they disagree with, which is probably great for us, because they’re completely making their propaganda seem so pathetic and deluded.
JJ: Right. But following from that, because it’s fascinating to me, in the way that MAGA and the right will just throw charges out there. And then when they’re disproven, they’ll say, Yeah, but they’re really still true.
It reminds me of the way prosecutors will never accept a wrongful conviction: If he didn’t do what we sent him to prison for, he did something else. So we were still right to send him to prison.
FAIR.org (8/17/23)
And I think, at a certain point, an observer has to acknowledge that truth is not the point. It’s just us versus them. And I think a lot of folks lose the plot right there, because we don’t know how to operate in a system where truth doesn’t matter. So in the face of just blatantly false charges against you, how do you keep going forward, and help other folks go forward themselves?
DK: I think one way we’ve done it is help people realize just how ridiculous it is, because they can say whatever they want, and they will continue to say whatever they want. They’re saying it as if it’s a fact. Even though, if any of this were true, they would’ve shut us down years ago, when they started bringing up these allegations. I think that is one way we approach it, is just making it as ridiculous as it is, and unserious as it is.
JJ: Finally, we need a brave independent press corps right now, that could push back on these scurrilous attacks—scratch ’em, you can see their falsehood, but they’re part of attacks on democracy and on human rights. Corporate media—spotty, good things here and there. But in the main, I don’t see it.
But of course, corporate media are not the only media. I wonder what your thoughts are, overall, on the state of journalism and protest, and just what you would like to see from reporters in this moment.
DK: When Mahmoud was arrested by ICE agents, I think there was a different sort of pushback than there were on groups that are being attacked in such ways, like these vague and false claims about supporting terrorism, or supporting Hamas, or being funded by these foreign agencies or whatever. I think there was some pushback from even mainstream media. They were asking critical-thinking questions that I feel like they’ve been completely not doing for years and years.
But when it’s a group, when it’s CODEPINK or all these other Palestine organizations, they don’t ask these critical-thinking questions that they’ve asked when it happens to individuals. So, when someone accuses a feminist organization in the US of being funded by a foreign government, I would like to hear them challenge that, because it’s a direct attack on civil society. We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and they’re trying to take us down a peg, and even mainstream media who claim to support women’s rights and all of these things don’t even question it at all. So I’d love to hear them actually be critical of the Trump administration in a way that’s not just benefiting their specific neoliberal values.
Danaka Katovich: “Their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion.”
JJ: And then, any final thoughts for activists who might be kind of afraid to go out in the street or to join an organization, because they feel targeted and fearful? What do you have to say to folks?
DK: I would say the fear is the point of all of this. I fluctuated between being scared that they want to shut down CODEPINK… The thing that I come back to is, their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion. The point is fear. And I think if they’ve instilled fear, then they’re winning. And I think it’s OK to be afraid. I think it’s normal and human. But in this trajectory that we’re on, it will only get scarier to resist what is happening.
JJ: And we’ll do it in community, yeah?
DK: Absolutely.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Danaka Katovich. She’s national co-director at the group CODEPINK. Thank you so much, Danaka Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
DK: Thank you so much for having me on.
The world doesn’t know yet what caused the dramatic power outage on the Iberian Peninsula (BBC, 4/28/25). Nevertheless, the right-wing press both in the US and Britain quickly exploited it to dubiously suggest that the blame rested with Spain’s push for more renewable energy sources. The insinuation that clean energy is at fault has even infected outlets like the New York Times and AP.
New York Post (4/30/25): “Experts have previously warned that Europe’s increasing reliance on renewable energy…could lead to blackouts and other supply issues.”
The right-wing New York Post (4/30/25), while admitting that a final determination on the cause of the outage in Spain hadn’t surfaced, ran with the headline “Devastating Blackout in Spain Raises Questions About Reliance on Solar Power, Wind Power.” As the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid criticized the Spanish government’s response, it reminded its readers that that government is “socialist.” It cited “experts” four times to pin blame on “renewables,” while naming only one. That expert noted that solar plants’ lack of inertia—which, the Post explained, is something produced by “gas and nuclear power plants,” means that “imbalances must be corrected more quickly.” (Inertia is not a characteristic unique to non-renewable energy, as the Post suggests; hydroelectric energy, another popular renewable, uses turbines and produces inertia.)
An op-ed by anti-environmentalists Gabriel Calzada and Fernández Ordóñez in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (4/30/25) said that “Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally.” They blamed “energy-transitionist ideologues” on the continent for the blackout, because they “forced in” renewables.
Again, while admitting that the cause of the outrage had yet to be determined, they echoed the Post’s suggestion that renewable sources are by their nature “unreliable,” focusing on their lack of “inertia”:
The greater the share of renewables vis-à-vis conventional power plants with synchronous turbines, the less inertia there is to cushion instantaneous load fluctuations in the grid.
This causes the whole system to become “increasingly fragile, with higher risk of failure.”
The far-right journal Compact (4/29/25) said renewable “sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs.” Admitting that the cause of the outrage was still unknown, it hoped the affair would repopularize climate-ravaging forms of power generation against woke wind farms and soyboy solar plants:
Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable.
Energy Central (8/14/24): “While transitioning to a renewable-based power grid presents challenges, the benefits significantly surpass the risks.”
The loss of power for Spain and Portugal, a major crisis reminiscent of the great northeast American blackout of the summer of 2003 (WABC, 8/14/23), has taught the world an important lesson about centrality of inertia in the electricity systems built around traditional energy sources. Gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants use giant spinning turbines that “store kinetic energy, which helps stabilize the grid by balancing supply and demand fluctuations,” explained Energy Central (8/14/24). “High inertia means the system can better withstand sudden disturbances, such as a generator tripping or a sudden surge in demand.”
Solar and wind energy, which are in growing use in Iberia and seen as a clean alternative in an age of climate crisis, lack this feature, which means integrating them into energy grids requires alternative ways of addressing energy fluctuation problems. It’s something engineers have long understood, and have been addressing with a variety of technical solutions (Green Tech Media, 8/7/20; IET Renewable Power Generation, 11/10/20).
In general, questions of inertia are an important concern of energy planners when it comes to balancing clean energy and the need to stabilize the grid. But they’re not the only way the grid is stabilized.
A Spanish professor of electrical engineering explained in Wired (5/1/25) that both local “meshes,” which help distribute electrical flows, and interconnections with neighboring grids are crucial for preventing the kind of imbalance that apparently led to the Iberian blackout. But the latter has always been Spain’s “weak point,” because of the “geographical barrier of the Pyrenees” mountains. Rather than suggest a pullback from solar or wind, as right-wing media seem to pine for, experts told Wired the needed response was greater interconnection, and more storage mechanisms or stabilizers to account for the reduction in inertia.
New York Times (4/29/25): “The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.”
But the anti-renewable drum beat from the right inspired similar reporting in more centrist corners. The New York Times (4/29/25) took a similar tone, under the headline, “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.” The article itself seemed to have an identity crisis, trying to paint the peninsula’s success in ramping up renewables as a false victory while at the same time acknowledging that it wasn’t just the renewable energy itself that caused the vulnerability:
The incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.
The article did also explain Spain’s relative lack of investment in necessary grid infrastructure and storage. But those who didn’t get past the headline would have come away with the same false impression about renewables as readers of the New York Post.
The Times (4/30/25) doubled down in a follow-up piece the next day, saying, “The incident has raised questions about whether Spain and Portugal’s rapid shift to renewable energy left them more vulnerable to outages.”
An AP (4/30/25) explainer, which was also picked up by the Washington Post (4/30/25), used phrases like “renewed attention” and “questions remain” to cast a vague haze over the role of the peninsula’s renewable energy:
On Tuesday, there was renewed attention on Spain’s renewable energy generation. The southern European nation is a leader in solar and wind power generation, with more than half of its energy last year having come from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.
Questions remain about whether Spain’s heavy renewable energy supply may have made its grid system more susceptible to the type of outage that took place Monday. The thinking goes that nonrenewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations observed Monday on Spain’s grid.
After sowing doubt about renewables, the AP wrote that Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, said “it was too early to draw a straight line between Monday’s event and Spain’s solar power generation.”
Euro News (4/29/25): “Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes…the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.”
Though none of the outlets above seemed able to find them, some experts suggested neither solar power nor inertia were likely at fault. Euronews (4/29/25) said:
Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling.
Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid—as per national safety protocols.
Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause,” it said in a statement. SolarPower Europe, UNEF and Global Solar Council also emphasise that photovoltaic power plants did not voluntarily disconnect; they were disconnected from the grid.
The English edition of the Spanish daily El País (5/1/25) concurred, quoting Pedro Fresco, general director of the Valencia Energy Sector Association:
The failure of a photovoltaic plant, however large, doesn’t seem likely to be the cause of the collapse of the entire electricity system…. Nor is it true that there weren’t enough synchronous sources at that time: There was nuclear, a lot of hydropower, some solar thermal and combined cycle power, and even cogeneration, coal and renewable waste… In fact, there was more synchronous power than at other times.
Others pointed more to the grid itself. Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso (4/30/25) said the “issue appears to be the management [emphasis added] of renewables in the modern grid.” The outage, he said, “should be a stark warning to governments: Investments in power storage and grid upgrades must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewables generation.”
The Guardian (4/29/25) also intervened, quoting a European energy analyst: “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause.” Further, the paper quoted University of Strathclyde electrical engineer Keith Bell:
Events of this scale have happened in many places around the world over the years, in power systems using fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro or variable renewables. It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from: You’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.
Experts say it could take months to determine the exact cause(s) of the outage (New York Times, 4/29/25).
Spanish power company chief Beatriz Corredor (Al Jazeera, 4/30/25): ““These technologies are already stable, and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”
The quickness of not only right-wing but also centrist outlets to blame solar and wind power for the debacle is in part rooted in Spain’s right-wing political opposition’s exploitation of the crisis, using it to bash the left-leaning governing parties and Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the nation’s energy company. Al Jazeera (4/30/25) quoted a spokesperson for the right-wing People’s Party:
Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government.
It’s easy to see why the People’s Party would politicize this. Just last year, the party fell under heavy criticism in Valencia, where the party is in local power, for its failure to act in the face of dire weather reports that led to massive flooding, killing more than 200 people (AP, 11/9/24). The national blackout has allowed the right to attempt to shift the anger toward the ruling Socialist Workers Party.
But it’s also par for the course for the right-wing media to defend the conservative alliance with the fossil fuel industry, which is threatened by any move to address the climate crisis. The media’s jump to blame Spain’s renewables for a massive blackout looks a whole lot like their eagerness to (falsely) blame wind power for Texas’s 2021 blackouts (Media Matters, 2/19/21; FAIR.org, 2/26/21).
While we may eventually know exactly what happened—likely to be a complicated mechanical explanation that should inform us how to better guard against future problems—propagandists know that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.
Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”
The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.
I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”
It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.
Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”
Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)
FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.
White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.
Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:
That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.
I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.
If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.
Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:
Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.
He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.
The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.
Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”
Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for The Nation (4/15/25).
Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.
Taibbi continued:
People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.
I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.
As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.
