Weekly Mind Dump: Threats & Journalists

What to do when MAGA comes after Substack writers?

Week of 3/9-15, 2025:

I received my first online threat to my life this evening. A clearly disturbed man posted on this newsletter, “Let’s kill Bruno.” There was more, but it’s so profane that I won’t include it here. Of course, I reported him to Substack. Quick research revealed that the man was a medical doctor until 2017 when his state stripped him of his medical license for illegally prescribing narcotics, DUI and having an illicit sexual relationship with a patient. It’s not the first threat to my life. As a U.S. diplomat I received two. One was by a Laotian guerrilla fighter who had some beef with me. That’s when my embassy authorized me to carry a weapon. Fortunately, it was an empty threat. The second was a blanket fatwa by Iran to assassinate American diplomats. I was chief of a U.S. consulate at the time. For a month, I was assigned an armed guard 24/7 (and I continued to pack a .38 Special). It put a serious crimp in my social life.

These days, folks hurl threats at each other as if they were throwing confetti. A MAGA-moonie recently posted on one of my LinkedIn commentaries: “You are now on our list.” Another wrote, “I still blame people like you for the covid shutdowns and mandates, so I guess we’ll be even.”

I don’t take such empty threats seriously. They’re cheap, a sign of our polarized time and a Wild West internet. What I do take seriously are threats from my own government. In his quest to become America’s Fuhrer, Donald Trump is amping up his crusade against the news media ever since lambasting them as “enemies of the people” and “fake news” in his first term.

After his election victory, Trump sued ABC News and the Des Moines Register for defamation. Despite legal experts’ view they likely would have won the case, ABC nonetheless agreed to settle for $16 million. Trump has likewise sued CBS for $20 billion over what he calls a “distorted” interview with Kamala Harris. He has sicced the FCC on PBS and NPR with a bogus charge over advertising and has just gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and Radio Liberty. Previously, he barred several mainstream news organizations from working at the White House and the Pentagon in favor of right-wing fringe media. The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the Los Angeles Times, owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg all preemptively caved to Trump.

Speaking to an audience of MAGA-approved prosecutors and law enforcement agents at the Justice Department this week, Trump next targeted CNN and MSNBC, describing them as “political arms of the Democrat party” and what they do as “illegal.”

It is clear that Trump is beginning an all-out assault on the free press. It fits in with the authoritarian recommendations outlined in Project 2025:

• Make it easier to seize journalists’ emails and phone records.

• Boot mainstream media reporters out of the White House,

• Kill funding for public broadcasting (NPR, PBS).

• Shut down Voice of America.

• Revoke the security clearances of former senior intelligence officials who discuss their work in the press or on social media (already done).

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider a petition to overturn the 1964 SCOTUS New York Times Co. v. Sullivan ruling which sets a high bar against public officials suing news media for libel. Overturning this case would open up news organizations and reporters to a barrage of lawsuits over what they write and broadcast. Trump would have a field day launching lawsuit after lawsuit as a means to intimidate and cow reporters and their employers using DOJ lawyers and funds. Remember, this is the same Supreme Court that overturned “established law,” Roe vs. Wade and bizarrely granted the president blanket immunity for any actions taken while in office.

Which gets me back to threats and the ability to report freely. I listened uneasily the other night to a discussion on MSNBC regarding Trump’s war on the news media. New York Times reporter David Enrich told Stephanie Ruhle that increasingly popular Substack writers could very well become the next target on the MAGA hit list. My readership has been burgeoning, with two dozen-to-three dozen new subscribers daily.

As Enrich explains in his new book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, the MAGA strategy is to use the courts as a weapon against press freedoms — both by browbeating news outlets with threats of litigation and by stripping away key protections that enable the media to report critically on those in power. “Every time I write a story,” one writer tells Enrich, “I have to think, Will I get sued over this?”

As I reported in a recent commentary, friends ask me if I’m not afraid to be so critical of Trump and the MAGA mob in my published writings. Others have told me that I’m “brave” for doing so, which, frankly, takes me aback. I’ve served in Cuba, Vietnam and other one-party, authoritarian nations. I know how such regimes control and intimidate writers and artists. America isn’t that! — Yet. But I refuse to obey in advance. I’m also particularly vulnerable, however, in that I must obtain official approval from State Department censors on my pieces dealing with national security. Their mandate is to ensure no official secrets are spilled. What if they’re told to start censoring based on political content? Do I knuckle under, or scoot across the border and publish from Canada? Then again, if Trump has his way, even that won’t be possible.