A Frenchman pulled me aside after we both had finished our lunch at a sidewalk restaurant here in northern Italy Thursday afternoon.
He’d heard me speaking the American lingo, and he wanted a word.
“I’m 80 years old” — “81,” his wife chimed in; fellow didn’t look a day over 70 — “and I’m very worried about what’s going to happen to my country,” he said.
“Your country! Hey, what about my country?”
“That is my point precisely,” he said. “Because whatever it is that happens in your country, happens in mine a few years later. You have this Trump, and now . . .”
“You mean Marine Le Pen?” I asked, naming the leader of France’s anti-immigration, nationalist and protectionist National Front party, who inherited the mantle from her radically antisemitic father.
“Absolutely,” he said. Sure, she was convicted of embezzlement this spring, and so can’t run for the French presidency in 2027, because in France they mean it, man, when a politician is found guilty of felonies, but she has her surrogates. The FN polls up to 48% of the vote in some French constituencies, and because of coalition governments, it could easily rise to power.
My new friend spent a career in the computer business in Paris, and consequently used to spend a lot of time in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley in the 1970s and ‘80s. “Such free thinkers, with the long hair!” he recalled. “Steve Jobs, in his turtlenecks and jeans!” He still consults. “And then I went back last year, and I couldn’t believe it. They were all … sucking up, is that what you say … to this Trump.”
Being in Europe over the last few days naturally has got me to thinking about the column I wrote some weeks back about the current anti-journalism regime’s shutting down of Radio Free Europe and other American broadcast stations around the world that speak truth to power in regions where the news is controlled by Trump’s fellow authoritarians.
That situation has taken a severe turn for the worse. It’s one thing to just have dead air for the former listeners in countries such as Russia and China where the undemocratic regimes otherwise control the airwaves.
It’s quite an awful other thing to do what Trump senior adviser Kari Lake announced this month: RFE and its sister stations will now broadcast OAN, One America News, the propaganda network that actually declines to report the news, describing itself proudly as one of the “greatest supporters” of Donald Trump, like him a spreader of outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Plus, it’s the place that hired as a host truly creepy former Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz after that bid fell apart amid the revelation that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old while a congressman.
“Kari Lake providing One America News Network to our global audiences makes a mockery of the agency’s history of independent non-partisan journalism,” says former U.S. Agency for Global Media Chief Financial Officer Grant Turner, who Trump appointed acting CEO of the parent agency to Radio Free Europe in 2019.
“I don’t think this complies with our statutory mandate and I don’t think audiences will take to it. The truth has a certain feel and audiences can sense that.”
The truth does have a certain feel, and it’s not one that Trump cares for. He prefers the mere loyalty of an OAN, one of whose anchors had to run stories past the Trump campaign during the election so that they “didn’t violate any of our rules or whatever,” Rudy Giuliani once testified under oath.
When Trump killed the real RFE in March, I quoted lyrics from REM’s first single, “Radio Free Europe.” Now, 40 years later, the group’s leader Michael Stipe has released the song again on vinyl, a benefit record for the station’s real employees. “We love journalism. We love freedom of speech. And we love the world,” Stipe said.
“This is a good time to celebrate the actual Radio Free Europe. They provide news of the world for people who are in really shut-down societies. It’s important for democracy, important in the fight against authoritarianism, that they remain.”
Words to live by, as we work toward better times.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.