Lo primero que hice el miércoles pasado, después de ver en diferido el debate que enfrentó a Kamala Harris con Donald Trump, fue releer el libro cuyo título inspira el de esta página: On Bullshit, de Harry Frankfurt. Su autor es un profesor de filosofía moral que murió el año pasado, a sus 92 años, después de tener el gusto de ver cómo su pequeño ensayo se convertía en una suerte de man…

Late in the summer of 2003, a team of television producers stepped off the elevator on the 26th floor of Trump Tower eager to survey the set of their next reality show. After years filming “Survivor” in jungles around the world, training cameras on exotic spiders and deadly snakes to evoke danger, they came looking for a different set of sensory clues, the tiny details that would convey wealth and power.

Right away, they knew they had a problem.

The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud. Then they spotted scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas. The décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame.

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate US news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip that killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region—but there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that US citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak.

In the Gaza genocide, now expanded to the West Bank, the US and UK have not only provided the main weapons of physical annihilation, they are also collaborating with their junior partner Israel in the war of public disinformation and deception. By now, it has become obvious to most observers in the US and UK that the provision of advanced weapons to the apartheid state, including thousands of American 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs, precision-guided air-to-ground hellfire missiles, and assorted other instruments of mass destruction, is part of an effort to wipe out the Palestinian civilian population through death and eventual deportation. Britain’s military corporation BAE provides Israel with parts of the F-35 fighter jets along with “systems for naval drones, missile guidance and components in fighter jets used against Palestinians in Gaza” (Lee-Doktor 2024).